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MCV 07/08/09 15
MCV INTERVIEW DUNCAN CROSS & FERGAL GARA, ASDA
CROSS & GARA: The duo pushing games to the forefront at Asda’s stores across the UK – and increasingly online
It Asda be progress The supermarket giant announced exciting new plans for games at its annual entertainment conference last month. Chris Dring was there and sat down with head of games buying Duncan Cross and category director Fergal Gara…
Tell us about the new store concept at Asda. DC: We started opening the ‘future concept’ stores in June last year. We have now launched 190 of them to date, and we’ll have done about 230 by the end of the year. Our target is to have these concepts in 320 of Asda’s 350 outlets.
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Also, with the increased space, it is about getting a more branded presence. We want to have a point-of-difference between the fixtures. You’ve seen the Nintendo and Xbox branding on our new mocks-up; we are really keen to bring gaming to life.
We’ve had £100,000 placed
How will they evolve? on our loyalty cards. This has DC: We are looking at far exceeded expetations in interactive touch screens terms of our targets. with a company called Duncan Cross Retec. These screens let customers understand trailers, and we can recommend titles through it, so if a Is staff training a key part of this? person likes Title A we can recommend DC: Absolutely. It is great having this Title B. We can also explain what each sort of kit, but you need the colleagues console does. This lets us demonstrate to educate customers and to try and upfantastic gaming products to the sell and grab sales for both ourselves customers in a visual way. and the publishing community.
What about the loyalty cards you’ve introduced? DC: We’ve had £100,000 placed onto those cards. It has far exceeded our expectations in terms of our targets. We’ve rolled out the Mario Kart gift card, and it enables customers from different points in the store to touch music, video and games. It is a great call-out, and enables us to get that particular brand and franchise in front of the customers. It also solves those gifting problems some customers have, when they’re just not certain what to buy.
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This was something that Woolworths did in the past... DC: They did it very well. And we want to follow that. We’ve got a