Camera Store - The Hell of Retail

The Trade Expo

As I mentioned several posts back, I went to a trade expo not too long ago. That's where people from different camera companies told us why we should sell their cameras. Salespeople "selling" to salespeople. And some of them were not that great salespeople. It was actually pretty funny, sometimes, to see some people who were clearly not technically trained talking about the features and design and details of their products...

The Trade Fair thing was only for people from my store chain (salespeople and managers and so on), so it was not that great an affair. If you're thinking of an enormous building full of fancy booths... think more of a school science fair, with a few tables each covered in papers and cameras, sometimes with a TV and/or poster behind them. Nothing too fancy. And in the back, the two corners each had 30 or so seats and a projector screen, for a series of half-hour-long powerpoint presentations given by the camera companies' salespeople.

Kodak's presentation was particularly funny. First, the guy could not get the powerpoint presentation to play a movie, which does nothing to build our confidence in him as someone who knows electronics.

He went on an on about how simple everything is. And you do like it simple, don't you? Simple is better than complicated, right? Anyways... You can load your friends email addresses onto the Kodak Easyshare program (which requires all kinds of steps, entering the right thing into the right window tons of times...), and then "tag" the pictures that you like, right after you take them, so that everyone gets sent the pictures as soon as you put the camera down on the dock. Except, "tagging" also takes a bunch of button-presses, as does uploading the email addresses into the camera and then choosing who gets which pictures. And when the pictures are emailed, are they reduced and compressed? because if they aren't, then a lot of people's email inboxes are gonna get clogged, but if they ARE reduced and compressed, then people with big inboxes who like sharp pictures are gonna be disappointed. The whole EasyShare system did not look easy and simple at all. Why not just put your pictures into folders, and email them out yourself? The EasyShare program also burns picture CDs. And after you burn a picture CD, you can add more pictures to it on another burn! (Wow, imagine if I could do that just with my operating system! Oh wait...). Another great example was the one-click printing. He showed us a window, half of which was a hige button that sais "PRINT!"... and the other half are pull-down menus so you can choose your printer, paper type, dpi, and a bunch more details, which means you're gonna click way more times than once. How deceptive.

The guy also can't say "Schneider" ("Snyder") or "aspherical" (AY-sPEErical). He says that the filter adapter "brings it to 55mm, which they tell me is a common size". Ah, I see you're an experienced photographer too. Jeez...

He tells us that the next-to-last number in the camera designation tells you how much optical zoom it has (the 7330 has 3X zoom)... but does the 7300 have ZERO zoom? Don't you mean, ONE times? No optical zoom means the max focal length is ONE TIMES the minimal focal length (same length), not zero!

"And you gotta get the camera dock! If not, then you have to find all those cables for the camera, plug them in... With the dock, all you have to do is put the camera on top of the dock!". Um... why is the dock any easier to hook up than the camera itself? And why would you lose the camera cables but not the dock cables, or know where to put the dock cables but not the camera cables? They're the same cables! "People buy the camera, and if they say they don't want a dock, they're usually back by the end of the weekend asking for that dock. Because who's buying these cameras? First time users!" Yeah, because your cameras SUCK! Here, he was very right - anyone who buys a Kodak digital camera is buying their first digicam, because no one makes that mistake twice.

(I don't like Kodak cameras. They are not ergonomic at all, have poorly-designed interfaces, don't have advanced features like manual controls and image stabilization, feel cheap and plasticky, are kinda big, and that whole EasyShare thing they pride themselves on so much is much more complicated than just using Windows to do the same things).

To his credit, some OTHER people asked some stupid questions. He showed two shots taken with the 7490, which has 10x optical zoom (another break of the third-digit-zoom rule). One shot zoomed all the way out, one all the way in. It did bring out a lot more detail. One of my store chain's salesmen raised his hand and asked "Is that the same frame"? He wanted to know if all that detail was in the zoomed-out shot. Great, even people who SELL cameras don't know the difference between optical and digital zoom...

Fuji's guy didn't even try to PRETEND he knew what he was talking about. "I often lose myself in trying to explain to the customers how our Super-CCD works, so we won't go into it... What it comes down to is, it records like a 5MP, but prints almost like a 10MP". Everything SO dumbed down. Not much more than you get just from readint the catalogue. (Of course, he could not say that the super CCD uses octagonal pixel sensors which leave room for little mini-sensors in between them, and that this does not quite double the resolution but gives the camera some data to keep the interpolation from being purely guesswork. That's not THAT complicated. But I guess "interpolation" has more syllables than he'd like any one word to have...). "This camera has a wide angle adapter lens..." How wide is it, I asked? Equivalent to what focal length? "I dunno, widER... I'd have to look that up". Great, so you can say "this is a great lens" but not say exactly how great. This is like a car salesman saying "This guy has a lot of horsepower!" How many? "I dunno... A lot!"

Most of Nikon's presentation was about how their cameras can guess better at aperture, shutterspeed, and white balance, than other cameras, so if you choose the right scene more, you get better pictures more easily. And he's right. But why not just get a camera with manual controls... Ah, never mind. He did make one serious slip-up, saying how Nikon's low-dispersion glass focuses light more sharply, making for more-highly-detailed pictures, and he illustrated this by showing something like the following graphic:



Here he's confusing FOCUS with CHROMATIC ABHERRATION. A lens that does not focus sharply would make light of ALL COLORS spread out behind it and end up, from one point, not all in the same point on the sensor. But when the spreading of light splits it into different colors, then that's not because of bad focus, that's because light of different colors refracts differently, and some colors will be focused more than others, and in different places from one another on the sensor. This is called chromatic abherration, and is a problem with a lot of cheaper telephoto lenses. Seeing the light split into a spectrum, and saying that this has to do with the focusing and dispersion/diffusion rather than with the curvature and refractive properties of the lens, is PRETTY BAD in my book.

I think that, in order to sell something, you can't just explain what the features do, you have to explain how they work, so that you can REALLy explain what's going on, what the user gets out of it, when it works and when it doesn't, etc. And this isn't rocket science here, people. I dunno, I was disappointed at how all I got was lists of features, and some images showing us what these features do (but rarely how they do it). Not much more than what you get in the catalogue. Except presented by enthusiastic salespeople, who are so EXCITED that it's so EASY for you to get great pictures and share them if you use their camera. Look, dude, stop being so excited, because the best thing you can do is tell me what to tell my customers so that they buy this camera. While a lot of the presentations included some "So you can tell your customers that the camera does THIS, and that it works easily and very well", most of them were more like "Wow, isn't this COOL?!". I can imagine a salesperson leaving this place, and later trying to tell a customer about a camera, like "It does this thing where you can see more detail when it's dark, and it knows to focus on the people... I forget the details, but trust me, it's really cool!". If you're presenting to salespeople, you can't be too much of a salesperson yourself. Tell us the features, tell us how to impress people with them, don't be too excited yourself, don't try to make US feel that the camera is cool in a way that we are so overwhelmed by it, we do not learn how to pass on that excitement ourselves. Don't just show us cool images, and cool comparison "WITHOUT the feature, WITH the feature" shots, and make us go "Wow"... TELL us how it works, because when WE have to sell the camera, we're not gonna have all those comparison images and so on. We can't say "Trust me, you get more detail when it's dark", we CAN say "the shutter knows to stay open for longer so that light from dark places exposes better, and the image stabilization keeps shake or motion blur from being a problem".

Salespeople know insincere selling when they see it. Well, don't all people? I guess not. Not with so many commercials relying so strongly on flashy loud presentation. "You should be excited by this!!!". Um... OK!!! Sheesh... Buying should not be based on being excited and impulsive and overhwelmed with how cool something is. It should be based on comparing features and prices. Right? Am I the only one who thinks this?

posted by Remus