JB Group, the owner of JB Hi-Fi, e&s and The Good Guys, is considering locating all three retail brands across several locations.
JB Group has shared plans to investigate sites where all three of its retail brands could be physically present in one location.
JB Group has confirmed there are no current plans to expand the e&s brand beyond Victoria at this stage and it is actively exploring further opportunities within its home state prior to expansion.
Speaking at its recent conference in Melbourne, e&s managing director Rob Sinclair described the opportunity to co-locate the three brands as “utopia”.
“We have discussed creating precincts for clients to shop in,” Sinclair said.
“Homemaker centres are great, but the utopia is to have all three brands close to each other. For us, if there isn’t a competitor making it an attractive precinct for us, the power of the JB Group is to have the precinct in-house and create that ourselves. We really are in charge of our own destiny when you see the unique position that all three brands in the group have.”
JB Group chief operating officer Nick Wells, supported Sinclair’s comments on stage during the same discussion at the conference.
“We like to be where customers are shopping generally and to have all three of our brands there. We believe they are complimentary and work well together, but at the same time we are very happy to be where competitors are. We believe in catchments, we believe in drawing traffic to an area, and we back our offer to be as good as anyone else’s in the market, so when consumers are there we think we can get them.”
Wells used a specific example of the Essendon precinct in Melbourne where all three brands are already currently located close to each other.
“We already have three stores sitting next to each other in a catchment, and all three are very successful stores,” he said.
Wells also elaborated on the three brands and where the synergies and separations exist within the JB Group parent business.
“Our brands go to market separately deliberately. We know what the role of each brand is and we want to protect our brands. e&s is a 60 year-old brand and it takes a long time to build a brand and it is easy to wreck it. For us, we want to protect the brands and go to market separately – and for suppliers that means anything from our perspective that is customer facing or impacts how the customer perceives the brand – buying, store operations, marketing, visual merchandising in store – those functions are separate in how we run our business – it is too risky to try and combine those, so we keep those functions separate.
“What that means is that e&s will continue to buy from suppliers in the same way they do today – yes they have the backing of JB Group and hopefully we can give the buying team great systems and tools and some intellect to buy better and yes we will share some data as well, but it will still be a pretty separate business into the future.
“We have to run these businesses separately because we don’t want to dilute the brands. The biggest risk that we have in our business is if we start to integrate functions and centralise everything and there is cross over on all of our brands and then we dilute all of our brands. We may miss out on some synergies overall, but this is the choice that we have made to protect the brands,” Wells said.
“When you talk about why e&s for us, fundamentally I come back to the culture piece and the focus on the customer – the products [the three retail brands] sell might be different, but we are known for the biggest range and the best brands and if you can’t get it at our stores you can’t get in anywhere. None of our retail brands really sell private label as we believe in selling the world’s greatest brands and value our customers. It doesn’t mean we are always the cheapest, but we are providing service and value and customers know they are not going to get ripped off when they shop with us.”