HTC is trying something new after having some pretty bad financial quarters lately. HTC believes it needs to have more of a retail presence. Which is probably true. So instead of HTC going out there and building a few stores in busy areas and in malls. They are getting a dedicated part of an existing store to be just for HTC. Basically like the Apple section at Best Buy. The picture below is actually from a Saturn Store in Germany, and it looks pretty nice. Complete with HTC devices, accessories and even some Beats Audio stuff to go along with it.
Prior to HTC, Samsung has tried the store-within-a-store approach in the United Kingdom and we still don’t know how well it turned out. But we do know that Samsung has had record sales of their phones and tablets over the past year. Probably thanks to the Galaxy S2 and S3 and the Galaxy Note and Note 2 line of devices.
Of course the store staff would be trained by HTC so they would know everything about their phones and making it easier to sell them. The Taiwanese manufacturer has also promised to expand these stores to other cities and other store chains. As far as how much this would help HTC and their current financial position, we’ll have to wait until probably Q2 2013 before we see any difference. Hopefully this will help HTC get back on track.
Hopefully this will bring some more brand awareness to HTC. Since HTC does make some great devices, but then they slap Sense on it. Maybe with these new stores, HTC will be able to show customers that Sense isn’t all that bad, or at least tell them they can unlock the bootloader and flash some CyanogenMod 10 or AOKP goodness the particular device.
If this store-within-a-store experiment does well, we may see HTC start to open up their own stores like Apple does which would be great for HTC’s business and bring them back into direct competition with Samsung. Although I’d much rather see a Google store full of HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Huawei, and other manufacturers devices in addition to Nexus and Chromebooks. How about you?