Who the Hell is Clive Peeters?

The question on all Sydneysiders lips (well, mine anyway) is who the hell is Clive Peeters and why does he have two e's?

I know full well who Clive Peeters is. I grew up in Melbourne and the family often ventured out to the Ringwood store to check out all the latest electrical items like Beta video recorders and jaffle irons. From memory that's where dad bought his two tier organ from as well.

Now, all these years later, Clive has entered the Sydney market and opened 5 stores. It's a tough market to crack - Harvey Norman and Bing Lee are very established players.

So what's Clive Peeter's point of difference? From the advertising I've seen it's the tagline "So easy". Well OK Clive, it might be easy if I lived next to your Auburn store, but that's a long way away. What else is so easy about it??

Apart from the fact that you have two e's, there's not a whole lot of difference going on. So I guess it all comes down to price, and that's not a great market entry strategy.

The best retailer who's established a point of difference has been Bunnings - Lowest Prices are Just the Begining - selling the message through their passionate staff. Enthusiasts for the home selling stuff to fellow enthusiasts. Plus they won't be beaten on price. Great strategy.

So it will be a diificult riide for Clive. Then again, Bing Lee has done pretty well using ad music sung to the tune of Monty Python's "I Like Chinese" so anything is possible I guess.

Farewell Slim Shady Snr

Get This - the best radio show on....um...radio, came to an end last week because it was too popular. Or something like that. Too much talking, not enough Nickleback, despite increasing the station average.

Tony Martin, Ed Kavalee and Richard Marsland will no doubt pop up elsewhere but in the meantime we'll have to do with the archives. Like Slim Shady Senior, who was around in the 1930's and was apparently the inspiration for Eminem.

Bear in mind with this video I've pulled the audio clip from their web site and cobbled it together with a couple of old photos I found floating about. Please welcome Slim Shady Snr.....



The amazing thing about Get This is that every week 50,000+ podcasts are downloaded. For the final show, something like 270,000 of the things were downloaded! That includes me. I don't listen to the radio in my car anymore. I just hook my iPod into my cassette deck and listen to Get This and my CD's straight off the iPod.

No ads, just the stuff I want to hear.

Also, an interesting report from David Dale in todays Sydney Morning Herald. He points out that sales of the top 15 DVD's over the last 3 months is quite different from last year. Back then it was movies. Now most of them are TV shows.

Like Get This and the Triple M network, shows like The Family Guy scare the crap out of the good folk at commercial networks so it just gets shunted around in bad time slots. Any wonder they can't handle it - this is their idea of a good station promo.

Consumers, not networks, now control the way in which shows are watched.

My media agency told me the other day that Channel 7 was increasing it's rates by about 10% next year. Channel 9 is pretty minimal and Channel 10 is somewhere in between. I need to reconfirm the data but it's something like this anyway. So as viewing audiences go down, the rates go up. Work that one out.

As an FMCG marketer, this is all really exciting. With the growth of private label, a reliance on price promotions to drive volumes, and margins being squeezed, it will be the best marketers who shine through and capture consumers hearts and minds.

And it will be the best agencies who can balance this quest with the commercial reality of having to get 3-5% volume increases in mass brands.