The way Joan Warner and her crew at CRA have talked up Digital Radio, you’d suspect she could sell sand in the Sahara. Stations have also come to the party with a saturation campaign to drive consumers to retail stores. And it’s there on the shop floor, where product sales are ultimately made, that the whole system often breaks down according Steve Ahern’s excellent story on shopping for digital radios. Apart from a few notable exceptions, radioinfo’s dedicated band of mystery shoppers found sales staff to be less than knowledgeable about the products they were selling. One salesman even told us that the reason they didn’t have any digital radios in stock was that the industry had yet to decide on what format it was going to use.

It also didn’t help that a test of a Grundig radio at The Good Guys Alexandria store in Sydney saw reception fading in and out. Having to explain to a prospective buyer that stations are still broadcasting at low power is not an ideal sales pitch.

No one in the industry expects digital to be an instant success. Most are prepared for a very long gestation period. But unless retail staff start to transfer some of the enthusiasm they have for selling flat screen TVs to selling Digital Radios, it may never reach the critical mass needed for success.

What experience have you had with Digital Radio in retail stores? Are you alarmed or relaxed and comfortable? What would you do to improve the situation in a hurry?

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