Goodbye to the best music store in Berlin, Just Music! 😔
Last weekend while visiting Just Music, I got a big surprise they are closing. Just Music was a huge music store in Berlin with 5th floors, tons of instruments, and private rooms for testing the instruments; in other words, Disneyland for musicians.
Unfortunately, this physical store couldn't compete with big online retailers like Amazon, high inflation and customers looking for cheaper products.
So, as an eCommerce evangelist, I couldn’t avoid the question, should companies move to only digital experiences? 💻
Probably not. Many researchers and large companies are betting more on omni-channel models, where offline still has a big impact on revenue.
Let me give you two simple examples.
Last year Adidas revenues were half online and half offline (approx.), so they are probably still investing a lot of sources in offline channels.
Another example is Zalando, Europe's largest fashion eCommerce company. If the future is online, why did they open physical stores in the last years?
According to these examples and many other pieces of research, the offline and online worlds, instead of cannibalizing revenue, should be allies; for example, many authors like Chaffey have found that behaviors like ROPO (research online, purchase offline) are becoming more common.
Finally, after I visited Just Music, I was thinking about the negative impact of bigger eCommerce on local and specialized businesses and I decided to share here some ideas to continue having nice local businesses in our cities:
1. Visit your local hobby dealer from time to time (books, music, board games, etc.), you are sure to find something new and nice.
2. Buy local over global: imagine you want to buy a book that is sold on Amazon or Thalia (a big German bookstore chain), but the price in Thalia is 50 cents higher. Make the effort and buy at Thalia.
3. Last but not least, share your experience with your friends and family.
I'm not saying that big retailers like Amazon are the bad guys; actually, Amazon is doing a fantastic job, but maybe sometimes, we could choose local/specialized retailers instead of Amazon. Their experience and expertise are worth it.
Do you have any other ideas to come back to local retailers, share with us?
Do you know of any other music stores in Berlin (or nearby)? Don't hesitate to let me know.
#digitalmarketing #ecommerce #omnichannel
⚫CEO Closer Music Corp, an expert in business scaling ⚫ We create catalogs with legal music ⚫ We are among 3 largest company producing music based on Direct Music License
1moVery nice and showing again how emotions and sales goes together