PMA February 2010 : Page 42Business & Marketing communication. They do not provide serious information, and that happens about 90 percent of the time. They may even spend time talking about the weather. Our staff has, on average, been with us for 15 to 20 years. They use sources of information such as magazines, exhibitions, and conversations with sales representatives. Internally, they keep themselves fully up to date. “To get the service they want, customers are willing to travel huge distances,” says Pernig. “A camera shop is like a good restaurant. It can be an hour away in the forest, but people will still go there.” The customer will buy the information he needs “Customers are not coming to us because our prices are cheap,” he adds. “We aim to be continually among the five most-expensive shops in Austria. Customers are willing to pay these prices. This provides the foundation on which the future of this business will be based. In the next five years, we will move to being increasingly an internet business and a shop where the customer buys the information he needs. “This can already be seen on photo services. We now have two kiosks and a minilab. When we installed the kiosks, we worried they would compete with the minilab. Thank goodness, we went ahead and installed the kiosks, because we have found about 50 percent of customers want the prints immediately and go to the kiosks. We don’t tangle with the local druggist chains on the price of processing. A standard 9-by-13 print costs 49 euro cents if it is generated by the minilab, but only 39 euro cents if it is generated by the kiosks. If the customer needs help to use a kiosk, then the price goes up by 10 euro cents; the customer reaction is, ‘no problem.’ He sees it like the difference between a self-service and an attended-service restaurant. If there is a waiter, you pay more. “We are very dependent on our reputation, which is generated to a large extent by word-of-mouth communications. A third of our business comes from Klagenfurt and Carinthia – the state where Foto Horst is located – while 60 percent comes from other parts of Austria. I note there are fewer and fewer imaging shops in city centers; instinct tells me we will have to move somewhere outside the city, though the location must be a nice one. Already, lots of our customers visit the shop when they are actually on their way somewhere else. A new location will certainly not be in a mall, The exterior of Foto Horst. where every type of product is on sale and where the customer is not forced to focus on us. We need to be where the customer will only be thinking about what we are offering. It will also have selling space only on the ground floor, so customers can see everything we do. There should also be a studio on the upper floor – I used to be a professional photographer.” Such a strategy would closely track one successfully adopted by U.K. independent retailer Park Cameras. A year ago, it closed its three existing retail locations and warehouse, and opened a major 16,000-square-foot store, which it had designed and built from scratch in a basically retail-free business area outside the medium- sized town of Burgess Hill, Sussex. The May 2009 edition of PMA Magazine – Connecting the Imaging Communities, carried an extensive article on the new store and its early trading performance. Don’t forget the basics There was one final surprise. Klagenfurt is located about 3 kilometers from the shore of a large lake, the Wörthersee. Looking at store listings in Portschach, a small town on the lake shore, there is a camera shop called Foto Felix. In addition to being the Latin word for “happy,” Felix is Pernig’s first name. “We have a shop in Portschach, Foto Felix, but it is only open in summer,” Pernig continues. “Most shops in Austria are called Foto Müller or Foto Meyer, or something like that. The underlying idea could be represented by boring shop names, such as Smith or Jones Cameras. We wanted to be a little different and present a lighter mood, which we tried to capture by using my first name. “The shop sells films, batteries, memory cards, souvenirs, postcards, and sunglasses; and it also has a kiosk. That is important. People there on holiday want to give their friends photos they have just taken, as a current mark of their friendship. This particularly applies where people make new friends, as they tend to do on holiday.” Foto Felix demonstrates Pernig does not ignore, and is not above exploiting, the most down-to-earth categories of photo retailing. So the bottom line at the Foto Horst business in Klagenfurt This view through the shop from the front toward the cloister shows a novel approach to selling camera bags. 42 PMA — February 2010 — www.pmai.org is, despite the current severe impact of the credit crunch, the unconventional philosophy and strategy adopted by Pernig have resulted in “sales growing on both the internet and in the shop.” Not bad. n Publication List |
