Wow, I just looked at my account.
The beemer is getting wacked! sorry "hoovered" -lol-
I'd happily kick John Major while he's down... but not MM.
So I'll post a bullish story just for him
timesonline.co.uk
(They just won a patent battle with Hoover too)
Dyson prepares to clean up as he enters American vacuum
From Abigail Rayner in New York
AT THE US launch party for Dyson, the bagless vacuum cleaner, James Dyson, their multimillionaire creator, is surrounded by a group of sharply dressed Manhattan women, vacuuming.
Dyson is here for the US launch of the brightly coloured wonders of the living room, specifically, the Root 8 Cyclonemodels, which, he explains to the crowd of onlookers, are 50 per cent better and more powerful than the previous models that have won the hearts of millions of Europeans.
Dyson is spending about $30 million (£19 million) over the next 12 months on expansion to the US.
The company does not normally favour advertising, preferring to plough money back into research. Its market research shows that word of mouth has been its best publicity. But the US is too big a place to rely on conversations over the garden fence. A print campaign, with adverts in weekend supplements and upmarket women’s magazine, is about to start. In the new year there will be a more costly television advertising campaign.
The adverts will not be the slick, lifestyle promotions cluttered with beautiful, happy people that Americans are used to, nor will they aim to amuse. They will be straightforward explanations of technology behind Dyson.
“Our ads are never funny, they are almost boring. I think vacuuming is serious and I don’t think its something to joke about,” Dyson says.
He has chosen Fallon, a global advertising agency to run the campaign, because, he says, they understand Dyson. “We liked the style, they are educational.”
In three weeks, Dysons will become available in Best Buy, the US department stores company with 500 outlets across the nation, which has a reputation for embracing new technology.
Most importantly, Dyson says, Best Buy has a sales staff that is large enough to educate consumers about its product. Over the next year, Dyson engineers, telephone support staff and marketers will travel across America, training US staff in the art of Dyson.
It is not the most opportune moment to enter the US market, which is still clawing its way back from recession. The stock market is in a tailspin and a summer of scandal has borne a public distrust of corporations. It seems unlikely that anyone would want to spend up to $429.99 on a vacuum cleaner. But Dyson disagrees.
“Vacuum cleaners are quite recession-proof because people retrench back into the home. If you look back historically, the sales don’t drop at the time of recession,” he says, recalling that the UK was in recession in 1993 when the first Dyson was launched.
Since opening two weeks ago in the Manhattan store, the company has sold 300 of the three models on offer, 15 times more than it had in stock.
Even so, Dyson has a long way to go before it will rival Hoover, which controls 25 per cent of the market, or Dirt Devil, with a 23 per cent share, and Eureka, which controls 17 per cent of the market.
The US is home to sixsevenths of the world’s vacuumers and is a market where Dyson feels it should be. Dyson says: “It’s mad for us not to have been here. If we are just half as successful as we have been in Britain, we’ll be selling 3.5 million vacuum cleaners.”
The US push comes as Dyson’s patience with the UK as a location for manufacturing has run out. Last week he shut a UK factory and shifted production to Malaysia, where labour costs are cheaper.
He believes that the UK could learn something from the US attitude towards the industry, which offers tax rebates for research and development.
“There is an interest in manufacturing here, at whatever level. High-tech manufacturing, but also basic manufacturing. That has revitalised quite basic industries.”
A previous foray by Dyson into the US ended in tears when the company licensed its technology to another company, which built its own casing.
Competitors responded by launching products that looked like the Dysons that were selling like hot cakes in Europe. The licensee’s market share dropped dramatically and Dyson spent years battling to buy it back, finally succeeding last December.
It was function, rather than fashion, that engendered the use of clear plastics because Dyson needed to see what was going on inside his inventions. “I really enjoyed seeing the dirt, what was happening to it. I thought consumers would too.”
But looks are certainly not everything: “It’s no good on its own,” he says, noting how he fell out of love with a beautiful but impractical kettle.
Indeed, Dyson’s products are born of an irritation of household things that don’t work very well.
He won’t say what new ways he is thinking up to enliven the mundane chores that spoil our weekends.
But with words that will set hearts across the world racing, he teases: “Ironing’s pretty ghastly isn’t it.” |
