Thursday, October 14, 2004
My Chat With iRiver
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "EVENT" @ 02:00 PM
As some of you may know, there was yet another press event held in New York City yesterday (there have been so many in the last couple of months). This one, called Digital Focus was specifically geared towards (as the name suggests) digital media. In fact, it was like looking at the news items we post here on DMT, in a real live room. :) It was good fun, other than the weird Baseball theme, and I got to meet Joel from Gizmodo and Mark from Shiny Plastic.
Anyways, before going to the event, when I saw the vendor list, I noticed that iRiver was going to be there and I was totally psyched about meeting their representatives. In fact, I was revving myself up to give them a piece of my mind regarding their awful marketing strategy which has caused a wonderful line of products to only make a 5% dent in the market. Anyways, here is a short account of what happened...
As soon as we (Janak from PPCT and I) entered the hall, I basically dragged him straight to the iRiver booth. There were two gentlemen from the iRiver camp showing off the H320, the PMC and the iFP-790. The booth was clearing just as we got there. After a quick oooh'ing and aah'ing over the H320 (which btw is awesome - the screen, the size, the weight, pictures will come in my next photo-essay), I started talking with one of the guys there (Hey Anders). It was cool to find out that he read DMT.
Anyways, I immediately started with my spiel about "what the hell are you guys doing to these awesome products?", and "where is your marketing?" and "when are you sending my a free H320? :)". Almost unsurprisingly, he claimed that they had heard it all. He also wasn't very surprised when I told him that I hadn't heard back after leaving serveral messages for their marketing deptartment about perhaps getting in touch and talking about some of the feedback we receive from users here at DMT. When I told them that whenever I tell the iRiver customer service about their product exposure problem, most conversations went like this - (me) "Why don't you advertise, you have a great product", (customer service) "iRiver advertises in so many magazines, how have you not caught any of the ads", (me) "how many magazines", (customer service) "at least three that I know of", (me) Bah! - the iRiver PR guys were just exasperated.
So clearly this is not a new problem for the PR section of the company. Here is what it seems to boil down to - apparently the entire iRiver marketing department consists of just one person who is understandably overworked (running after Jenna Jameson must be hard work ;-)). But even more importantly, it seems that all of their sales problems seem to stem from a severe lack of a real marketing budget. So if any iRiver execs (or people that can whisper something into the ears of the iRiver execs) are reading this, please re-think your marketing strategy. I cannot stress more that I absolutely love your products, and tons more people out there would too, if they only knew about them.
Before leaving (three hours later) I went back to the iRiver booth (with Mark from Shiny Plastic) and spoke to both PR reps for some time, basically repeating my concerns from before, and talking about strategies for fixing this. They stated that they are not really worried and that iRiver will start to carve out more of the market for themselves in 2005. Also, they are going to be working on better synchronization in release of product news as well as firmware among their different international sites. Well, we'll see.
PS - Just to add to the depression, I come home to find Bono (U2) singing a quick 15 second clip of the cover of their Vertigo album in an awesome iPod + iTunes ad.
Anyways, before going to the event, when I saw the vendor list, I noticed that iRiver was going to be there and I was totally psyched about meeting their representatives. In fact, I was revving myself up to give them a piece of my mind regarding their awful marketing strategy which has caused a wonderful line of products to only make a 5% dent in the market. Anyways, here is a short account of what happened...
As soon as we (Janak from PPCT and I) entered the hall, I basically dragged him straight to the iRiver booth. There were two gentlemen from the iRiver camp showing off the H320, the PMC and the iFP-790. The booth was clearing just as we got there. After a quick oooh'ing and aah'ing over the H320 (which btw is awesome - the screen, the size, the weight, pictures will come in my next photo-essay), I started talking with one of the guys there (Hey Anders). It was cool to find out that he read DMT.
Anyways, I immediately started with my spiel about "what the hell are you guys doing to these awesome products?", and "where is your marketing?" and "when are you sending my a free H320? :)". Almost unsurprisingly, he claimed that they had heard it all. He also wasn't very surprised when I told him that I hadn't heard back after leaving serveral messages for their marketing deptartment about perhaps getting in touch and talking about some of the feedback we receive from users here at DMT. When I told them that whenever I tell the iRiver customer service about their product exposure problem, most conversations went like this - (me) "Why don't you advertise, you have a great product", (customer service) "iRiver advertises in so many magazines, how have you not caught any of the ads", (me) "how many magazines", (customer service) "at least three that I know of", (me) Bah! - the iRiver PR guys were just exasperated.
So clearly this is not a new problem for the PR section of the company. Here is what it seems to boil down to - apparently the entire iRiver marketing department consists of just one person who is understandably overworked (running after Jenna Jameson must be hard work ;-)). But even more importantly, it seems that all of their sales problems seem to stem from a severe lack of a real marketing budget. So if any iRiver execs (or people that can whisper something into the ears of the iRiver execs) are reading this, please re-think your marketing strategy. I cannot stress more that I absolutely love your products, and tons more people out there would too, if they only knew about them.
Before leaving (three hours later) I went back to the iRiver booth (with Mark from Shiny Plastic) and spoke to both PR reps for some time, basically repeating my concerns from before, and talking about strategies for fixing this. They stated that they are not really worried and that iRiver will start to carve out more of the market for themselves in 2005. Also, they are going to be working on better synchronization in release of product news as well as firmware among their different international sites. Well, we'll see.
PS - Just to add to the depression, I come home to find Bono (U2) singing a quick 15 second clip of the cover of their Vertigo album in an awesome iPod + iTunes ad.
