Its Sights Trained on GoPro, Activeon Seeks Bigger Presence in Action-Camera Category
With its sights trained on market leader GoPro, action-camera supplier Activeon “sits and competes on all the specs and qualities that you would expect from a premium-quality piece of equipment,” said Jonathan Zupnik, Activeon executive vice president-sales, marketing and new business development, in a Wednesday interview.
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At Activeon, “there’s no positioning this product as trying to come in at a lower price and simply sell on price,” Zupnik said. “It’s really about the full feature set in the camera. We’re offering value. We’re putting a few more features in for the price, but by no means do we feel that we need to come in and be the tablet-killer and be one of the 50 or 60 brands that come in and take the business to a new low.”
In its merchandising, Activeon doesn’t mind going head-to-head against GoPro and trumpeting the “significant differences” between both brands’ comparable products, Zupnik said. For example, unlike the GoPro Hero at $129, Activeon’s existing CX camera, at $119, comes “completely out of its housing, which you cannot do” with the Hero, he said. If the battery goes dead on the Hero, “you’re done for the day,” as opposed to the CX, where the removable housing makes it easy to install a replacement battery, he said. The CX also has a two-inch LCD screen, vs. no LCD screen on the Hero, he said.
Coming in October will be the Wi-Fi-capable CX Gold, Zupnik said. At $249, it’s $50 less than the comparable GoPro Hero + LCD, he said. The CX Gold will have a 16-megapixel “pro-grade” CMOS sensor compared with an 8-megapixel CMOS sensor on the GoPro model. The CX Gold also moves to a two-inch built-in touch screen, slightly larger than the 1.8-inch touch screen on the GoPro model, he said. At 60 frames a second, the CX Pro will have double the frame rate of the CX, and that’s better for slow-motion effects, he said.
Activeon wants its feature sets to be perceived as “open and friendly to what we see as a broadening market,” Zupnik said. “We’ll always compare to these folks, simply because they’re the name,” he said of GoPro. “From a market-share perspective, they’re the Apple of the category, even bigger. But there’s people looking at this category literally doubling in size from 2015 to 2018.” He cited CEA’s June CE ownership study that found fewer than 10 percent of U.S. homes own an action camera and 85 percent of owners are first-time buyers.
Zupnik gives GoPro big kudos for creating the action-camera category, he said. “Credit is due to them,” he said. “You had all the major retailers tell GoPro in the past, ‘No thank you, we don’t want you,’” he said. “And they went out street to street, door to door, bike shop, surf shop, boom, boom, boom, and built a business. My hat’s off to them. But they also opened the door for other quality cameras to enter the market.”
Activeon has had little trouble landing placements for the CX at key national retailers such as Best Buy, Sears, Target and Walmart, and is in the process of nailing down deals with many of the same accounts for the CX Gold, said Zupnik, himself a former CE executive at Sears during the DTV transition. “Interestingly enough, they’re pretty open to having competition in the marketplace,” Zupnik said of the national chains. “So it’s been good for us.”
Communicating Activeon’s compelling story at the point of sale is “the trickiest part” of the company’s retail execution, Zupnik said. “The reason why we’re investing in those end caps, is basically because if it was just product sitting on a shelf,” it wouldn’t succeed, he said. “We know how people shop. We’ve put as much detail as possible on the packaging. But if we sit back and wait and think people are going to read the packaging when they go in to shop, it’s a little too late.” Activeon also is relying heavily on social media, “building up the knowledge” for the brand “through actual content,” which is why its four-year promotional partnership with Cirque du Soleil is “so important,” he said.
Battery life of Activeon cameras is “one of the reasons why we’re not rushing into 4K,” Zupnik said. “You’ve got to solve the battery issue. Go out and just read what people are posting, when they’re recording at 4K, they’re dead in 30 or 40 minutes. We’re working on solutions to dramatically improve that.” The company is quoting a two-hour battery life on the CX Gold on a full charge, Zupnik said. Were 4K available on an Activeon camera today, “I doubt we would quote anything higher than probably an hour and 20 minutes, but in reality, you’re probably at 45 minutes, 50 tops,” he said.
As a feature, 4K for Activeon is “an important piece to have,” Zupnik said when we asked why do 4K at all. Among action-camera suppliers, “we would rather be on the early curve, especially with where we are and who we are and how good a product we know we’re bringing to the market,” he said. “Technically, we’re already late.” Would it be a “horrific problem if we didn’t bring out 4K in 2016?” he asked rhetorically. “Probably not. But in making sure people are aware that we’ll bring you the best of what’s available, we’ll have it in the marketplace.”