Samsung is set to roll out a new retail activation to support its whitegoods line-up this year, focusing on smart appliances, the connected home and premium products as three major marketing messages for its range. The point of sale follows the successful launch of the Paragon in-store display last year, which saw Samsung showcase its home entertainment and CE range in a single connected environment.
The news follows the unveiling of Samsung’s 2014 appliance line-up at CES in Las Vegas last week, which saw premium kitchen appliances and connected whitegoods take centre stage at the brand’s keynote and on the Samsung stand.
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Speaking to Appliance Retailer about the Connected Home concept, Samsung Electronics Australia corporate vice president of consumer electronics, Philip Newton, said the retail activation has taken months of development and planning.
“In-store, we have the Paragon [point of sale display]…the next step for us is Connected Home,” he said. “We’ve already done proof of concept last September — we built it and we got it all working — and we’re in the process of rebuilding another prototype.
“It essentially brings four rooms of the house into one space: your kitchen, living room, study and laundry. It’s a showcase of all the products that work in those rooms, but also how they work when they’re connected.”
At CES Samsung’s North American division showcased new “Smart Home” appliances that communicate with each other thanks to a dedicated smartphone app. This “app driven platform” allows users to control and monitor their appliances when they’re away from the home — similar to the Wi-Fi controlled air conditioner that Samsung launched in Australia in 2012, but now on a larger scale with more products.
While switching on the washing machine while you’re at work is possible with the Smart Home app, users will also be able to do things like mirroring content from the TV in the living room and watching it on the 7-inch screen built into their Samsung T9000 refrigerator (a model that is expected to launch into Australia at the end of this year).
According to Newton, Samsung’s point of sale was developed based on insights from previous in-store activations (including the aforementioned Paragon store-in-store concept and the brand’s Apex Home Appliance display). With the new Connected Home concept, the brand is keen to work with retailers to ensure the appliances are demonstrated in the best possible way in a retail store.
“The Connected Home [retail display] takes it to the next level — it brings the best of Apex and Paragon and brings it together across multiple rooms of the house.
“We need to work with our retailers to make sure that they’re maximising the messaging. Whatever we do in the individual stores — and each store will be, and must be, treated independently — we need to work out what’s going to be best for both them and ourselves, in terms of displaying the technology.
“Not every store can take every product, so you’ve got to provide almost a customised solution with a set of options, and that’s what we’ll be doing. So we could do stand alone end-cap designs for individual fridges — the Chef Collection refrigerator or the Sparkling refrigerator for example. It just depends on the store, their demographic and their idea of who their customer is. We’ll work with them individually.
“And with the bigger stores, the bigger the format the larger our display will be. But it’s a two-way street, there’s no point doing what our retail partners don’t want us to do, because it just won’t work. There’s got to be a win in it for both.”
