I just got a refurbished netbook for the good lady wife from Dixons, the price was suprisingly the cheapest I could find on the first half dozen pages of the Google.
And, the customer service lived up to the advert — they still had no idea if the item was in stock a full 3 working days after they’d taken my money.

I feel I had a good deal, and I feel it’s a good advert. They’ve chosen to differentiate solely on price and have stated quite baldly you won’t get much service — more honest than most. As Ben Bodien says, I’m not sure how sustainable this kind of barefaced snide is. Doesn’t do much to make you trust them as a brand.

I’m not sure the customers are going to get the usability aspect all that much but it does point out something they may not have thought of in a clever way.

@Dan – they just left the High Street and went online although they are part of an electronics giant group too.

R! :-)

But that’s not necessarily true. It’s obvious that a lot of these stores have some sort of style guide that someone with design knowledge put together. And laying out sales fliers with a minimum of white space could actually be more labor intensive than an “upscale” looking design. It’s a deliberate effort to tie an idea of cost savings into the brand, regardless of the reality of the situation.

We could be seeing a similar trend emerge in web based brands. “We don’t waste money on fancy usability stuff so that we can pass the savings on to you!” But I bet they still look at things like conversion rates and worry about abandoned shopping carts. They just try to do it under the radar because part of their brand is labeling all that stuff as “expensive” and then distancing themselves from it. They might focus on word choice and organization rather than making improvements by applying UI patterns.

I bet this advert was successful and that just goes to show how influential ads can be. You don’t have to be the cheapest to win customers, you just have to lead them to believe you are. If they believe it enough they won’t bother to look elsewhere. To that end, this advert rules.

I happen to know that Dixons won’t be the cheapest online but if I didn’t then yeah, I guess this advert would have the desired effect on me.

As for user experience I can’t say I want to be mollycoddled by overly friendly sales staff or be given the 5 star treatment, in fact I seek to avoid it. I care about two things when buying something like a TV; The price and how easy it would be to return it if something went wrong – after sales support. While I’m sure there are people who want the luxury shopping experience (Why else would John Lewis still be in business?) I don’t think I’m alone. This ad targets people like me right between the eyes. It tells me that department stores are good places to “shop” where Dixons is a good place to buy stuff from. Is that not, in itself, a good user experience? In the current backlash against the hounding salesman, I’d say it was.

While they’re on the money as far as that goes, I think they need to be careful with their ad slogans, as Dixons (or indeed any company in the DSG such as PC World) genuinely really is the last place I ever want to go for anything. The staff rarely know much about the products they’re selling that you can’t read off the box yourself, will try and up-sell you at every turn even on morally suspect add-on options like appliance insurance, and are far from being the cheapest anyway.

It’s interesting to ponder on how sustainable this trend is. As the tech-savvy generations replace older generations who are intimidated by the variety of choice when it comes to consumer electronics markets, I’d guess we’ll see a steady shift toward online resellers as we have done with books. But then where will we try before we buy? I feel sorry for John Lewis now. I might buy my next TV from them just to stick up for their corner if its the likes of the idiots at Dixons in the other.

Basically it says “We’re shit and the ONLY reason people will buy off us is cause we’re cheaper.”

Problem is .. they’re not THE cheapest. If you’re buying online there’s cheaper.

Competing purely on price is very dangerous, because it’s easy to beat you.

I could set up a website tomorrow and beat Dixons on price. I can’t beat M&S or John Lewis on reputation overnight .. that takes years to manage.

If you’re gonna go to John Lewis, or somewhere “good” .. get them to show you a product and buy online .. there’s cheaper than Dixon.

AND you have no brand loyalty .. so you don’t care if it’s Dixons or not.

AND why bother doing traditional advertising if you have no brand loyalty .. it’s the only thing old media’s (quite) good at doing .. building brand.

Major. Major. Fail.

When I saw the campaign I thought it was quite clever: I didn’t realise at first that they adapted the type/colours of the ads depending on which other store they were referring too, and that makes it funnier, of course.

So as someone who has no idea how Dixons are actually like, I thought it was pretty funny and if I would actually wanna buy a plasma screen, I’d probably remember them the next time I was browsing around :)