Successful Marketing Campaigns Keep GE Appliance Sales Humming
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--During 2009, most appliance manufacturers have faced the challenge of a wary consumer spending money more carefully. GE placed its marketing emphasis on offering different ways to make replacing and upgrading aging appliances more affordable to consumers at a time when they needed it most. GE has met and is meeting that challenge in 2009 with a variety of innovative promotions.
The Latest
Currently GE makes it easy for consumers to refresh the look of their kitchen in the span of a weekend. Simply replacing old appliances with a suite of new GE®, Profile® or Café® appliances can give an updated look to a kitchen and provides consumers with the renovated look that fits the budget. As part of the Weekend Renovation promotion, GE has reduced prices on select appliances to dealers enabling participating dealers to offer consumers instant savings and factory rebates up to $1,500. As instant savings may vary by dealer, consumers should visit participating dealers or go to www.geappliances.com for details.
The GE Weekend Renovation promotion started August 27th and will run until November 1st, giving consumers plenty of time, prior to the busy holiday entertaining season, to visit their participating neighborhood appliance store or home center and take advantage of a special promotion for a full suite of appliances.
There are up to 35 different appliance models from which to choose. If consumers purchase Profile or Café appliances, they can take advantage of the current GE Profile/Café Kitchen Package factory rebate that can give consumers up to $500 savings via mail-in rebate.
Emphasis on GE® Brand
From early spring until July 6, GE offered a free upgrade to stainless steel on select GE® appliances for the same price as traditional finishes, white, black or bisque. Concurrently GE ran a Free Stainless Steel Upgrade Sweepstakes and a chance to win a dream vacation or a kitchen full of stainless steel appliances.
To add to the fun GE created a Strong As Steel website and video. It was time for consumers to "get cut in the kitchen" with the ultimate in workout appliances -- GE stainless steel. Visitors to the site could watch "fitness pros" cook up a sweat as they showed the perfect form for doing Oven Squats, Dishwasher Lunges, Refrigerator Curls and much more on the GE Strong as Steel infomercial. For $9.95, consumers could even order a DVD of their own. This "tongue-in-cheek" workout promoted the free upgrade to stainless steel and sent consumers to their participating retailers for details.
The site, www.strong-as-steel.com, offered visitors a chance to share this campy workout with friends through popular social media networking and blog sites.
"The promotion was extremely well received by consumers and retailers alike enabling GE to grow sales of mid-line appliances," explains Paul Klein, General Manager Brand & Advertising for GE Consumer & Industrial. "The promotion specifically targeted more affordable models and resulted in a sales lift of 150% in those models," he continued.
GE Consumer & Industrial spans the globe as an industry leader in major appliances, lighting and integrated industrial equipment, systems and services. Providing solutions for commercial, industrial and residential use in more than 100 countries, GE Consumer & Industrial uses innovative technologies and ecomaginationSM, a GE initiative to aggressively bring to market new technologies that help customers and consumers meet pressing environmental challenges, to deliver comfort, convenience and electrical protection and control. General Electric (NYSE: GE), imagination at work, sells products under the Monogram®, Profile™, GE®, Hotpoint®, SmartWater™, Reveal® and Energy Smart® consumer brands, and Entellisys®, Tetra®, Vio™ and Immersion® commercial brands. For more information, consumers may visit www.ge.com.