Tweeter Concept Store Features Interactive Tours, Demos

Tweeter hits its potential customers with the A/V "wow" factor right when they walk in the newly redesigned concept store in Dedham, Mass.

An interactive tour begins with a demo of a Vutec Art Screen that hides a flat-panel TV behind a framed piece of art that scrolls up to reveal the display.

It's not something customers would see if they walked into the big-box retailer down the street.

This Tweeter concept store, one of a handful the company has rolled out, announces its experiential differences from the opening stop on the tour: informative signage about the manufacturer and spotlighted products and an engaging demo and narrative from sales personnel or the self-guided "Try Me" button.

The store emphasizes demos and consumer education, while easing off on sales pressure. For a hybrid retailer that has gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, an acquisition by Schultze Asset Management, and a change at the top of the organization (George Granoff took over for Joe McGuire as president and CEO last August) all within the last year, Tweeter seems headed in a good direction.

Perhaps this redesigned concept store will make its way further into Tweeter's roughly 100 stores nationwide.

"One of the things I learned early on when I arrived at Tweeter was one of the unique characteristics of the company is the quality of our organization," Granoff says of the Dedham store makeover.

"We have very highly skilled sales, installation and service people, and really this store was all done by them. There was a lot of early on technological hurdles we had to get over, but we've gotten over all of them, and it was with the help of the skills set in the company."

The tour proves good demos are still the best way to sell A/V. The tour I got continued with rooms that mimic a kitchen, family room and bedroom.

This is where home control enters the picture -- certainly not what the average Joe might expect after coming in to buy TVs and surround sound. Tweeter shows a variety of control products from universal remotes to audio distribution to whole-home control.

"It allows us to make that business a lot easier to bring to the masses," says Bob Stinehour, director of training for Tweeter's home control offerings.

"We can take this thing that's hidden in black boxes, which custom installers know about, and explain it to customers."

I'm encouraged to hit the "Try Me" buttons at the stops on the tour -- which differentiates this concept store from others Tweeter has opened -- and have a pleasant voice tell me more about the different setups.

We head to the "Big Screen Adventure" room, the home theater, where Tweeter showcases the entire turnkey operation from impressive A/V to cool "tricks" like closing the doors with the touch of a button. The D-Box motion simulator seats add a nice little jolt to the experience, too.

From there, it's more TVs and integration of things like DLNA technology, TiVo and Vudu. "There are three things the consumer wants to know if they haven't shopped for a TV in a while," Stinehour says.

"What can they do today? How do I feed it? And what's right for me?"

Checking out more ways to "feed it" we come to the lounge with a couple of big screens paired with PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Tweeter clearly understands how huge gaming is today.

After passing through the staple wall of flat-panel TVs, we head into "The Video Challenge" room. Opposing walls are lined with three TVs apiece -- plasma on one side, LCD on the other -- that lead to a Pioneer Kuro setup as the showcase.

In the middle is an information bar that has buttons, which you can press for demos highlighting resolution, color, contrast, and content.

With seven TVs all showing the same content, it makes for an effective demo for consumers whose brains get fried hearing things like 120 Hz or 1080p -- this way they know what to look for, like clarity of license plates on moving cars or color accuracy among a set of drawing pencils.

Audio, of course, is half the experience of home theater. The "Signature Sound Room" lets you hear lineups from Klipsch, Focal, Polk Audio and MartinLogan.

If that's not enough, Tweeter's mobile audio solutions and accessories await before the tour concludes.

Tweeter stresses its "No. 1 in customer satisfaction" rating from J.D. Power and Associates. If the Dedham store is any indication, customers will be more than happy with their experience at Tweeter's new concept stores.

Whether Tweeter can leverage that and crunch the numbers to bring the concept experience nationwide remains to be seen.

"Among the challenges we wanted to deal with were creating a bullet-proof demonstration, which means that a customer could engage themselves with the push of a "Try Me" button, they could engage a demonstration and it would go off every time, every day," Granoff says.

"My experience traveling the stores was that our demos were complicated, and if a customer or salesperson fiddled with a receiver or changed a plug on a speaker, the demo wouldn't work.

"All you have to do as a salesmen is be defeated once by what they call death by demo, and if you've been defeated ever, you don't want to ever walk into a room and cue up a customer for a demo and try to hit it off and it doesn't work.

"For Tweeter, [we look at ourselves as] the company that is the most skilled for installation and therefore, for all that is holy, we should be able to do it in our stores."