By Claire Reilly
With the launch of Magellan’s latest range of personal fitness products, including the Cyclo 500 range of cycling navigation devices and the Echo “smart fitness watch”, the brand is making a greater push into the connected fitness category, first initiated with the launch of the Switch and Switch Up multisport devices last year.
According to Paris Basson, Magellan Australia and New Zealand brand manager, the brand has found good results in the connected fitness category in Australia, with retailers and consumers alike getting behind the products that combine GPS, smart functionality and dedicated sports training features.
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Speaking about retailer support for the category, he said Magellan had seen “Dick Smith, Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi and all the top tier consumer electronics retailers take on fitness”. But while the products are innovative and exciting enough to entice buyers, he said it would take a shift in perception for consumers to see consumer electronics retailers as a first stop for buying connected fitness products.
“I suppose the retailers’ biggest challenge is changing consumer perception [so they think] ‘I’m not going to go to Dick Smith just to buy my DVD player, but I’m actually going to go there and buy my fitness watch’,” he said.
“They’ve certainly got the customers. I believe they just need to change the perception, not the customer, to think about going there to shop and buy."
But he noted that retailers are already doing their bit to shift attitudes towards fitness products in CE stores.
“Retailers are catching up by creating fitness bays and having whole stations within [their stores]," he said. "We’ve seen Harvey Norman produce a fantastic in-store display and they’ve got the power of advertising.
“They are certainly taking it very seriously.”
One of the big issues that Basson has identified in the connected fitness category, and one that affects many categories in the consumer electronics space, is parallel importing.
“There are overseas markets which are bringing in a lot of our competitors’ products into this market, but the product isn’t Australianised," said Basson. "All our products are pretty much Australianised; they’re built here specifically for this country and New Zealand.”
Because of the focus on localised map content in Magellan’s range, as well as the crowd-sourced mapping data and bike route maps provided by local councils for the brand’s new Cyclo products, Basson emphasised that “you can’t just ship products into Australia” and expect them to be of the same quality.
Ultimately, he said, it was about providing quality products to support local retailers of all sizes.
“For us, we deal with everyone from the likes of the top-tier retailers to the independent bike stores. At Magellan, we very much try and support the independents, and also play nicely with the big fish, which is always a thin line."