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MCV 08/10/10 21 NEWS ANALYSIS: GAME
Shepherd has only been in the job for just over 90 days, and already he has a plan in place to grow and strengthen GAME and Gamestation
THE NEW GAME PLAN
GAME Group has felt the effect of a rollercoaster games market. But new CEO Ian Shepherd has a plan to maintain the market leader’s edge. What is it? Michael French finds out…
THEY SAY it’s the first 90 days of any new business or job that really tests its leader. Coincidentally, when GAME detailed
its interim financials last week, it was 90 days exactly since new CEO Ian Shepherd stepped in to replace Lisa Morgan, who left in April. So talk about thrown in at the deep end – no sooner had Shepherd started and GAME was already in pre-results lock down. And understandably so: the results
weren’t brilliant. In the UK and Ireland, total sales were down by 17.8 per cent and like for like sales were down by 16.2 per cent – but nevertheless in line with the market shrinkage. For the half-year to July 31st the
Group’s revenue was down 9.6 per cent to £624.6m compared to £690.8m the year previously, with like for like sales down 10 per cent.
So while GAME isn’t failing, it has borne the brunt of the market’s very mixed, changeable fortunes.
A RATIONAL APPROACH Before Shepherd was appointed, GAME’s interim CEO and chairman had excitable, high-level ideas of the digital transformation and embracing online that would see the firm into the future. Now his feet are under the table,
Shepherd’s plan to regroup the firm and forge on might not sound as excited, but is much more practical, more sensible. “For me coming in as CEO the
question is: what’s next? What’s the direction of travel? What are our untapped opportunities and the potentials for us to unlock?” He says there are two key areas. “The first is customer loyalty and customer relations management –
“
We want to bring online and retail together – use the best of the web in- store and use the site as a driver for in-store physical sales.
Ian Shepherd, GAME ”
specifically the Reward Card business. We have 15m Reward Card customers in the territories in which we operate. “Take a step back from our industry
and you see that’s a database the same size as the Tesco Clubcard, as the Boots Advantage card. That’s an asset bigger than most other retailers – and certainly way beyond what many specialists have access to. “The challenge for us now is how to build that customer base for more granular marketing, more one-to-one marketing and more talented offers for people to really increase your share of their spend and draw them back in and buy new content. The size of opportunity there is really significant.” The second area, he says, is to evolve
GAME and Gamestation into ‘multi- channel’ operations. “Our market share across the group online is much lower than bricks and
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