Where’s The Box?

On Tuesday Vonage made noise about their relationships with Staples and Linksys. In their press release about the Linksys relationship they said:

The Linksys Phone Adapter with 2 Phone Ports (PAP2) and the Linksys Broadband Router with 2-Phone Ports (RT31P2) bundled with Vonage phone service offerings are immediately available at select retailers throughout the United States.

A quick check of a few Staples stores in Southern California yielded zero Vonage ready Linksys routers yet the product is available on the staples.com web site where they offer one business day availability.

The idea of available at select retailers must mean locations not in Southern California. But that’s only half of the story. Reps I asked about the product knew nothing about Vonage yet, but in their defence a lot of times it takes weeks to educate them.

My experience with Staples is not from lack of experience. A few years back I was associated with a company that attempted help save the Ricochet service under the Metricom flag. We worked with Staples on a series of promotions but in almost all cases while the merchandise and marketing managers knew what was going on, until we began floor level, feet on the street marketing education, the knowledge of the technology department managers was nowhere to the level of what one used to see at Radio Shack in their heyday. Read between the lines and you’ll know what I’m saying.

The bottom line is Vonage and Linksys can do all the chest thumping they want to do online, but the war of choice happens at the final three feet of the sale at retail, and not having the product now, and lack of product knowledge make this a pull through, not a push through marketing effort right now.