got to have a really innovative supplier base, which is willing to invest for the long term and then we’ll grow with them. We won’t make a sustainable business by only
stocking the top three licenses and just going full pelt with those, because we need to offer custom- ers choice. So my job is focused on making sure our range and our offer is good enough that customers will want to shop with us. The work we do each year shows that mums’ loyalty to Tesco grows and to keep that going, it’s important we have a consistently good offer. Mums aren’t daft and we know they shop around but there’s a core loyalty if we consistently deliver on environment, value, availability and range.
Can Tesco become the number one toy
retailer in the UK? Yes, and we’ve been pretty clear to our suppliers about that. But we need to grow not just by the scale of our
store base, we need to grow because we are offer- ing mums a better offer each year. So we’ll continue to develop our own brands for instance because mums say they love the point of difference and seeing something they won’t see anywhere else. When I came into Tesco the percentage of
own-brand toys here was significantly higher and I recognised that in order for mums to think we had a really great offer we had to be there with what she saw advertised and what kids were asking for in the playground. So that had to be our first priority
and as a result we’ve really increased the amount of space to branded and licensed product. Own -brand has a really important role within the
range but it’s a very different role to the suppliers’ brands.
And direct-to-retail with licensed product: is that something that will
increase too? You’ve got to approach it with a very good plan on licensing and you have to start with what your customers want to see: key movies, DVD releases, where there’s a real customer demand to see not only the most distributed products in the market, but also see some points of difference. That’s where some exclusive development on licences works, but we won’t do it just for the sake of it. (will be really great.)
Has that ‘Big Movie’ release and corresponding uplift in toy sales lost its
cachet now? If all the family has been to see Cars 2 then it’s going to be relevant to them at that time, so that’s what we need to reflect. But we need to be careful to respond to what customers are currently inter- ested in and when there’s new programming, we need to make sure we reflect that in our offer. The licensing industry needs to be realistic. To
expect everything to measure up to Toy Story 3 is unlikely, because it was a phenomenon and the
business had spent years working towards it. So there’s an element of needing a reality check on what we should expect, but that doesn’t mean licences can’t deliver great business – they deliver great business because they reflect what families are talking about at the time. But you create a great event for customers as much out of a new toy line as you can a DVD release, but you’ve got to have great product to market at the time. I don’t think we’re short of great product though.
The supplier base has continued to innovate through a pretty rocky economic period and we need to see the innovation continue, as long as we can still offer great value too.
Is ‘value’ still the overriding factor for
Tesco? It’s not about price value, but play value. When I look at a toy I ask how many hours is that toy going to entertain a child? And if three times as much play value makes it more expensive as a toy, then that’s fine, because as a mum of two I know how quickly things can get tossed away, so when I’m reviewing the ranges the buyers have proposed, it’s not just the price per se, it’s the amount of value it’s got. Parents know if a product is being played with
again and again, which is why areas like role-play and dolls houses have continual appeal and some products will stay with children from the age of two to five or six. On the other hand, there are some
Toyworld 35
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