The Aray Group

Inspiration

The Aray Group is a home appliance and consumer electronics company distributing major global brands in the CIS region through its headquarters in the United Arab Emirates.

In addition to being a distributor, Aray extended its presence downstream with several retail outlets under its own banner. During the flat-panel boom, sales were severely skewed with slow to no uptake in the audio category, particularly sound bars and home theatre systems.

Given low market pull despite their best efforts, channel partners began to reduce purchasing of audio categories in an effort to reduce inventory and blocked capital.

As a member of product, I worked with marketing to survey walk-in customers to understand their shopping experience. The surveys included questions on what prompted customers to visit the store, i.e. their pre-context. The survey included motivating factors behind making or not making a purchase decision.

Questions around audio systems (mentioned above) were introduced to gain insight into why the category failed to gain traction. Similar question sets were later circulated to store staff.

Results revealed a strong knowledge gap in audio systems, both in terms of technical aspects and consumer awareness.

I secured store layouts and in-store visuals to understand the customer setting. The analysis showed a strong product categorisation in layouts with no cross-category linking. In other words, the visual categories were set in isolation away from audio systems. Unless, a customer showed interest in exploring audio systems, only then would store staff introduce the category.

The hypothesis from product was that if customers were introduced to how audio complemented the visual experience, the propensity for bundled purchases would raise the audio category’s sales.

The marketing team worked with merchandising to re-arrange a couple of stores to test the hypothesis. ‘Cinema pods’ were set up to give customers a better sensory experience. They simulated a living space with typical furniture and a mix of audio-visual support systems across price ranges.

Impact

Quarterly results indicated that stores selling the concept of a living space with an audio-visual experience sold six times the volume of audio equipment in affected categories than peers.

Later, merchandisers were trained to provide better information and guidance to customers up-selling and cross-selling products within the audio-visual space.