INTERVIEW: IAN SHEPHERD, GAME Raising the GAME
Less than a year after he took over, GAME Group CEO Ian Shepherd has unveiled a plan to ‘reinvent’ the retailer. Michael French talks to him to find out what this new vision means for the firm’s two chains
FOR SOME time, GAME Group has been the first to admit that it needs to reclaim relevancy and up its game in terms of hi-tech retailing. Hence its unveiling of a new five- point plan two weeks ago that will overhaul the finer points of its GAME and Gamestation brands. Why change? “The industry is changing, and customers demand it,” says Group CEO Ian Shepherd, whose plan comes into force less than a year after he took over the firm. “We’ve seen structural product differences which favour the specialist, and in tough economic times people bought games from someone who could make it affordable – so we outperformed the market over Christmas. “But these strengths are our greatest weakness if they lead to complacency.”
He points out the many risks that threaten GAME; increasing competition, the rise of digital content, squeezed margins and so on. “The hallmark of all these issues is change – customers are changing the games they play, they are changing the way they buy. This is an opportunity for us, because the games market is getting more confusing and we can position ourselves as an aggregator of content and choice. We can turn concerns about the business into growth.” And GAME sees growth ahead. Internal forecasts show that despite the recent dip, and further pressures ahead, the market, especially the boxed product one, will start growing again from 2013. Says Shepherd: “Growth is coming from the new but the business we are already in is very important.” So his plan, then, is a cohesive attempt to unite and improve all these areas at once, ready for an reinvigorated market in 2013.
CHANGING CHANNELS The first point is making the Group a multi-channel retailer. Aren’t all retailers, when they offer online,
18 March 4th 2011
physical and digital, already multi- channel? Yes, but GAME’s activity hasn’t been good enough. In the last year, the firm has been moving to a new web infrastructure that unites stock systems. That means a better web offer and more integration with mail order and High Street. The Group soft-launched a new
Gamestation.co.uk last month, which includes new video and social content features (first trialled in the firm’s now-aborted GamesNation social network, quietly tested last year) that will also soon be added to
GAME.co.uk before a total international roll-out.
Better online services include the the “blindingly obvious” (Shepherd’s words) addition of online pre-owned. “We have 2,000 SKUs online that show new and pre-owned prices – over the next few months we will engineer that to be all our products. It is a fantastic value proposition online,” he says. “A standalone online competitor cannot do that.” Another addition is long-time- coming improvements to ‘click and collect’ and mail order in-store. “Our sites have been the digital representation of our stores,” says
“ A lot of digital
content is add-ons to existing physical content. It’s a
mistake to think it is bought by separate customers.
Ian Shepherd, GAME
Shepherd. “But I want the stores to be a physical manifestation of our websites.” He talks of “endless aisles” of content, where smaller games not given representation on shelves can still be ordered from the shop floor and sent to a customer within 24 hours. No customer will ever be turned away without an order. “If you work out the maths of what that does to in-store conversion the potential is huge. We are making the convenience of stores available to online customers.”
Shepherd wants to see huge growth in overall online marketshare. Currently, GAME’s total share of the market is around 35 per cent – but it’s only got 15 per cent of the online market. Along with more joined-up thinking, GAME’s entering new areas too – specifically digital, until now the missing link in its multi- faceted approach. Shepherd is expecting a watershed moment in 2013; by that point digital should have tripled its revenues at GAME to account for just under 10 per cent of its revenues.
The actual investments will focus on a few areas. GAME already has a
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