Industry Interview: Vendaria

sm.com:Tell us a little about Vendaria
Roth: We are a merchandising service provider, integrating rich media solutions using patent-pending technology to accelerate online and off-line marketing initiatives.

sm.com: How do you get the rich media idea in to the head of clients so they agree to go ahead with it?
Roth: What we’ve identified is certain problems manufacturers face today in trying to convey the features and benefits of their products to consumers. With the proliferation of big-box retailers, we’ve seen a depletion over the past decade in the quality of knowledgeable help at the point of purchase in brick-and-mortar stores. Manufacturers are really attune to that problem – they are spending millions of dollars in R&D, advertising, and branding, and it ends up in the hands of retailers, some of whom don’t make any effort to even pretend to represent their products in the fashion that they would ultimately like to see them represented in. So we’re helping to solve that problem by allowing manufacturers to have a direct dialog with the consumer without interfering with their existing retail channel partners in what is arguably the most powerful form of communication ever invented – video. That concept resonates with retailers because it solves many of their challenges, with inconsistent product presentation, both online and in-store, high cost of customer support, qualifying potential buyers, lack of differentiation, brand defection, mitigating returns.

sm.com: Is most of what you’re doing e-tailer-based or is it also marketing awareness of the product launch?
Roth: It is primarily the former. The type of consumer that we are dealing with has drilled down through multiple potential retailers, hundreds if not thousands of product SKUs and now in essence is holding this product their hands saying, "I’m thinking about buying this product, I need just a little bit more information to make my decision." That’s where we come in. They click a button, they get a video, it gives them the high level features and benefits and that’s often enough to push them over the edge to make a purchasing decision. Some of the manufacturers are also finding uses for this with product launches and their out-bound kinds of marketing that they might want to do, but primarily, it’s a point of purchase tactic that’s deployed on the e-tailer Web sites.

sm.com: Can they actually track sales based on this?
Roth: Yes, they can, although they don’t always share that with us. We have a technology called Capture Track and if a retailer is willing to deploy, it will allow us to track conversions. We’ve done tests and in each case we’ve demonstrated a tremendous boost in sales. One of the things that we knew intuitively that research is starting to bear out now is that while consumers are certainly purchasing more online, others may not make a purchase online, but they are most certainly going to the Web to do research. Again, getting back to the lack of qualified sales help in the stores, people feel that they can get really good information online.

In many cases we are reaching a consumer who is intending to make a purchasing decision and who intends to make that decision online and in other cases we’re reaching consumers who are just doing their research and who fully intend to make their purchase offline. When there is a video and there is that level of information about the product, somebody who wasn’t intending to purchase online might feel that they are getting adequate information to make a decision and click the "Buy" button and purchase the product. We hope that we are having that kind of influence and the statistics show that we’re averaging, at a minimum, a four times increase in sale when the video is deployed.

sm.com: Have you developed any of your own software?
Roth: Yes, we do have some "secret software" of our own that is patent-pending. But that is not the core of our value proposition. We consider ourselves a service provider – a merchandising service provider. We happen to deploy these tactics online, but it could also be used in-store. Whether it’s online or off-line, we don’t care. We think that there will be an opportunity for us to move to the point of purchase in the brick and mortar stores through the use of kiosks and things like that. With the lack of quality service at the point of purchase within the brick and mortar store, video enabled kiosks can help improve that situation dramatically. There is no reason that this online tactic couldn’t work equally as well inside the store.