Around the traps: RCA’s solution to ABBA marketing problems has been to
establish a special ABBA warehouse
Rolling Stone (Australian edition) 13 January 1977
ABBA Capers, Part Two. After four weeks at the top of the Kent Report’s top
100 albums list there are reports in Sydney that ABBA’s
Arrival may have ended, and their
departure could be sooner than expected. The group’s company, RCA, has aroused
the criticism of a number of record dealers who say that its bulk order, mass
marketing approach is not doing them a lot of good.
In the first place, RCA adopted the policy, prior to
Arrival’s release, of being
particularly heavy-handed about ordering patterns. In a letter to retailers the
company’s managing director, Bob Cook, outlined the supply problems which beset
the company when ABBA’s last album exploded onto the market following the March
showing of a TV special on the band. These have been partly caused by “frequent
re-ordering of small quantities” which prevented the company from getting a
clear picture of real growth potential which in turn would have permitted better
production scheduling. So RCA came up with a radical innovation in marketing: it
set up a special ABBA warehouse with ABBA staff, forward ordering of production
was set in motion, and representatives of the trucking companies were even
located in the warehouse to co-ordinate shipping schedules. The company went
farther than this however; it put two conditions on the usage of this facility:
only orders which specified the ABBA single, album, cassette or cartridge of
Arrival were to be processed through
the facility and only orders in box-lot quantities were to be processed (singles
in 25, 50 or 100 unit boxes, albums in 50 unit boxes or in counter display boxes
of 70 units, and cassettes in 20 unit boxes). Orders which were for quantities
of less than a full box would be passed on to the regular distribution system
(with inevitable delays) and orders which included other products would be
similarly treated even if the ABBA selection exceeded the minimum quantities
That latter condition was, in a way, an inadvertent method of discriminating
against the company’s other product – and quite probably put limits on orders of
other RCA releases. But the kicker was not so much in these conditions as in the
mass marketing approach. Specialist record retailers were angry about the fact
that the album was readily available in department stores and other high traffic
outlets (which of course are much better geared to take advantage of the special
warehousing and ordering arrangements) and also that there was some heavy
discounting going on from very early in the release period. As one said last
week “next thing you know the bloody record will be available in service
stations.”
The record dealer’s argument is that wider availability of the album depletes
their sales, and that sales of albums like
Arrival (high quantity, rapid
turnover) are economically crucial to them. These sales provide the surplus
funds which can be spent on product that might otherwise not be purchased. But
as well as that while dealers have to buy their product (they can’t send it back
if it fails to sell) the high traffic customers usually receive theirs on a sale
or return basis. This is not unusual; often it is the only basis on which the
stores will take large quantities of records. But it does put them at a
marketing advantage.
The situation gets complicated when sales are not quite matching
expectations, as now seems to be the case with
Arrival. Although RCA is quite happy
with the record’s progress to date there are some disquieting indications that
it will not have the longevity as Number One album that its predecessors
enjoyed. The single Money, Money, Money
has already dropped out of the 2SM Number One spot (replaced by Chicago’s
treakly If You Leave Me Now) and
there are signs that the same thing may happen on the Kent Report’s national
singles chart. If the single drops it will be after only five weeks at Number
One (compared with Dancing
Queen’s eight weeks and
Fernando’s fifteen weeks.) It should
be pointed out that all of these singles are taken from
Arrival and that if their performance
is any indication the album should sell its projected million units. However in
Sydney at least there are signs of an unexpected challenger for the Number One
album spot: Manfred Mann’s The Roaring
Silence
RCA has one overall problem that its mass marketing approach cannot contain;
although its sales through non-surveyed outlets (department stores) could be
through the roof, these will not be reflected in the charts. Furthermore
department store sales will tend to bleed off record store sales, thus
compounding the dilemma of Arrival’s
chart performance. Ultimately it is the charts which dealers follow when
ordering records; and if Arrival does
not show signs of the solid and lengthy market performance which has
characterised ABBA’s other album sales they will be careful about future
ordering.
