High Street ready for Kinect launch frenzy

Leading retailers are planning special Kinect charts and in-store demo areas to celebrate the peripheral’s arrival next week – despite a complete sell-out nationwide.

GAME has already been running Kinect evenings in many of its stores, which the firm says have given it an edge over its rivals.

What I think is most important is generating a level of noise around the format in-store,” said GAME trading director Adam Davis.

Every time we show the product to people in stores we get a reaction. That demonstrability is absolutely key, and we are the only guys I think that is doing that. And that has given us a real advantage in driving pre-orders better than anyone else.

From our perspective we are very lucky to have such a good relationship with Microsoft. This means we are still able to maintain taking pre-orders even now, and we are pretty confident of getting more in time for launch.

I think we are one of the only retailers to really evangelise Kinect, and we’ve done it with the constraints we have in terms of square footage.”

Asda also believes it can be a ‘destination store’ for Kinect, with 200 midnight openings planned.

Here at Asda we are treating the launch of Kinect like we would a new console,” said Asda buyer Alastair Islip.

This means front-of-store displays, in-department takeover, above the line marketing plans and lots of in-store theatre like standees, posters, floor stickers, and so on. We have dedicated space in the Asda Entertainment department in over 330 of our stores, including a new Kinect software chart. We have also produced Asda training videos to educate our colleagues on what Kinect is and how it works.

Clearly Kinect is a very mass-market product and we pride ourselves on being great at speaking to a broad cross-section of people. We really believe we can be a destination store for Kinect and have put a lot of work into making Kinect a huge success at Asda.”