Giving retailers plenty of time to plan for Christmas, Roberts recently showcased a wide range of product offers for the festive season, including two new sound systems, new colours and finishes for its classic models, better environmental performance from some its favourites and two new analogues.
IER asked Owen Waters, Roberts’ sales and marketing director, which offers are most significant for the company: “This would be our COLOURstream radio with colour touch screen which incorporates DAB/FM, wi-fi radio and the docking for iPod into an acoustically tuned cabinet. Every function is accessed via colour touch screen similar to the iPhone or sat nav. It is a very stable product, being exhaustively tested. The second one would be the Revival iSTREAM. It is almost identical to the classic Revival model but it incorporates DAB, FM and wi-fi. Initially it will be launched only in black but other colours and finishes will follow.”
Roberts has also recently launched two analogue radios, Classic 996 and Classic 997 (available in white and black) which offer LW/MW and FM wavebands and are very competitively prices. Owen Walters explained to IER the rationale behind this decision. “The analogue business is still thriving. We supply approximately 1,400 retailers and they told us that there is a significant demand for analogue radio. Mature consumers aren’t interested in the latest technology but want their news delivered by a simple and reliable product. We have been making analogue radios for 75 years and we have a very loyal customer base. Independent dealers have been very single minded in demanding from us not only new product propositions but also clarity on what’s happening in terms of migration to DAB. Mr Vaizey’s announcement that consumers will dictate the speed of transition gave us even more reasons to invest in promoting analogue for a bit longer than we anticipated.”
