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Retail Buying

Notes Focusing on Bricks and Clicks
In the ever-changing audio/video marketplace, Monster remains at the forefront of product
innovation and brand awareness. The company adds 400 to 600 new products annually to
its catalog of more than 4,000 items.

A company of more than 800 employees, Monster counts on both bricks and clicks to
merchandise its products. It sells to thousands of retailers and distributors worldwide.
Monster also has direct relationships with more than fifty (50) authorized e-commerce
vendors on the Web, ranging from consumer giants Amazon, BestBuy, and RadioShack to
sites such as Crutchfield.com, OneCall.com, Vanns.com, and BHPhotoVideo.com.
A key Touch Point
Monster’s customers—audiophiles, videophiles, car audio enthusiasts, professional
musicians, and recording studio engineers—have a growing need for ever-better product
information. Whether they are pulling products from shelves in retail stores or buying
online, customers are doing more and more of their research over the Web.

Photos for Selling
Customers want to see what they are buying, such as the form factor of cable connectors,
the weave of cables, the design of speakers, and the displays of amplifiers and power
supplies. Monster maintains a staff of professional photographers and several in-house
studios. It produces all of its own product photos, which it then publishes in its own
product catalogs and Web site (www. monstercable.com), and also syndicates to its growing
network of e-commerce vendors.

Yet customers are becoming more demanding. “We’ve had to step up our level of
photography to meet our customers’ desires and to reflect our own need for asset access
within the company,” Klar reports. “We used to produce one picture per product. Now we
need five or six shots, reflecting different backgrounds, angles, and perspectives. Our
customers want to see more photos of what they are planning to buy.” When they cannot
touch and poke the products, customers need to view the product details online.
Managing the Visual Experience

Adopting Cumulus as Part of the e-commerce Initiative
Fortunately, Monster has developed its e-commerce initiative around the capabilities of a
digital asset management system. Monster adopted Cumulus in 1999. Monster has steadily
enhanced its digital asset management capabilities with each successive version of Cumulus.
Monster now uses Cumulus Workgroup Edition to manage all of its product photographs,
digital videos, and other digital assets for both electronic and hard-copy distribution.
Monster relies on Cumulus when developing collateral for its own needs as well as when
syndicating photos to its distributors and retailers.
A Central Repository
Using Cumulus, Monster employees can easily find product photos when designing Web
pages, promotional materials, package designs, and product data sheets. All of the product
photos are stored in an online repository and catalogued with a predefined set of
product-related terms.
No longer do graphic designers and marketers have to search through one set of directories
for product thumbnails, another for low-resolution screen shots, and a third place for
high-resolution photos, suitable for print publications. No longer are product photos

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