Vizio Supremacy
For those of you that have been able to visit either of our stores in North Sioux City or Vermillion, I’m sure one of the first things you noticed is the prominence of Vizio’s LCD TVs. We’ve been a big fan of Vizio almost from the inception of our store. From the beginning Vizio has done an excellent job of balancing features and price to consistently produce extremely high value products. Certainly, companies like Samsung and Samsung can, and do, produce great products, but sometimes they try to leverage their brand recognition or a special feature for an obscene price premium. Vizio doesn’t seem to have ever fallen into that trap. They simply crank out product after product with improved features and lower prices.
I am fortunate that in my career I’ve had the chance to work with a number of very bright and interesting people, and William Wang, the CEO of Vizio is one of them. William is a very focused and driven individual who is in it for the long run. His objective is simply to drive features up and costs down knowing the result will be high customer satisfaction and more sales. I really appreciate that philosophy and it’s the same one we employ at Dakota PC Warehouse. There are occasions where one might be able to charge more for something and try to extract every penny from someone’s wallet. There are plenty of companies that use this sales philosophy and some are successful, at least in the short term. But, I believe that you’ll do much better in the long run by helping someone buy a product that they love and having walking away with plenty of money still in their pocket. In general, these two things lead to them also having a very big smile.
In my years at Gateway we employed a similar approach and it’s no surprise that a number of ex-Gateway folks have senior positions at Vizio. In the 1990s Gateway and Dell overtook brands like IBM and Compaq in PCs, and the past few years we’ve seen Vizio dueling with Sony and Samsung for the top spot in LCD TVs. In Q1 of 2009 Vizio rose to the spot and earlier this week they proved it wasn’t a fluke and did it again when Digitimes released the industry sales figures for Q2 2009 (link below). What is even more amazing is the Vizio had almost 2x the market share as Sony, and more than Toshiba, Panasonic and Sharp COMBINED.
We typically stock Sony, Sharp and Samsung TVs in addition to Vizio, so if you’d ever like to see them side-by-side, please stop in and see us. And, congratulations to all my friends at Vizio!
Check out the latest Vizio article below, “Vizio maintains lead in US LCD TV market in 2Q09, says iSuppli”
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20090818PR202.html
-By Bob Burnett
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