@ROSEHAN
No announcement?
Not even on your website.
What gives?
This is unfortunate. Not the best way to treat your loyal customers.
StandardModel
You would assume that any customer-centric business would have on-going relationships and communications with their existing customers.
Why?
Because one of Marketingās (and broadly Business) truths is that - generally - it is much cheaper to keep, nurture and cross sell products to existing customers than entertaining the costs and efforts of acquiring new ones.
Moreover, developing strong relationships with existing customers opens the door to advocacy, recommendations and referral - all leading to more sales.
A quick look at how customer centric brands behave will strengthen these views, across a wide variety of product categories.
And, not surprisingly, this is even more pronounced in āluxuryā product categories, where a high price premium - compared to the rest of the competitive offering - is not only linked to a superior product performance, quality of components or costs of production (think - for example - of a Ferrari car), but - because of such aura and brand reputation - to a closer relationship with the brand itself.
Customer centric businesses understand this so well that - in this age of rich data about who buys, where they buy and how much they spend (just to mention the basicsā¦) - they constantly deploy tools to engage - meaningfully - with their customers and strengthen this long term relationship.
Surely this new Rose product didnāt come out of the magicianās hat overnight, and yet - as if there wasnāt enough evidence that people buy more than one of your products - HiFi Rose doesnāt deem appropriate letting their existing customer base know.
I wonāt speculate on why that is.
Surely thereās no āmarketing blokeā, let alone a marketing departmentā¦!
Whichever is the right answer, HI-Fi Rose is not a customer centric business.
Usually the type of ācultureā that defines a customer centric business rests with a founder/leader/CEO and the whole business is - accordingly - structured, organised and made accountable to provide value to the end customer.
This is an approach that either you have or you donāt.
And, in this latter case, as far as HiFi Rose is concerned, it looks like that your customers - as much of your supposed āmarketingā and your legendary software development - are just an afterthought.
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alessandro,
Well said.
What I donāt understand is why shoot yourself in the foot?
There just is no upside to this approach.
StandardModel
Dear @StandardModel - I think they donāt have the slightest clue, so itās not a deliberate act of shooting themselves in the foot - itās just the way they are set up and poorly organised as a business.
I think that - throughout these years - we have all seen enough evidence of this.
Looks like a pyramidal organisational structure with one guy at the top calling the shots and everyone else below running around without a clear path of value (nb: this doesnāt mean ācheapā) to the end customer. Add to this cocktail some specific geographical cultural biases/influences and you have HiFi Rose.
Like you correctly say, thereās no upside here. I have seen similar cases across decades of career in business many times.
Clearly the HiFi Rose business has an ambition and a distinctive story about it (design, performance, components, etc.) but they simply donāt understand the power of developing/nurturing meaningful customer engagement.
1 Like
Hi
Just to clarify somethingā¦
Audio companies follow a pattern of sending out early kit to companies and YT reviewers before the announcement.
They then place an embargo on when the announcement can be made to the public.
So dealers already have access to the product. Or at least an eval unit.
They sometimes announce something at a show w details later. Or do the announcement at show.
This happens w computer hardware as well. Although they leak a bit more so you know a product is coming but you donāt know anything about it.
What I was disappointed in is that they have a new product, the embargo gets lifted, but their own web site doesnāt have anything up.
They goal should be to have everything lined up and just before the embargo is to be lifted, they update their website. It doesnāt steal the thunder because you can see the reviews and see the specs from the company.
Its the coordination that sucks.
Just to addā¦
Yes it would have been nice to have some blurb up here first.
alessandro,
I am a critic of some aspects of HiFi Rose because I am a devoted āfan boyā. I just feel with a little common sense it could be a fantastic brand. The hardware is brilliant. If only the software matched the hardware. If only they would listen to their customer base. These are not impossible tasks. Just prioritize them. Yes, resources are limited but this is still possible with minimal expenditure. Itās a matter of focus. Others can do it so why not Hi Fi Rose?
StandardModel
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Ah now the truth comes out.
I do love my RS520 warts and all.
The issue though is that software is harder than the hardware. While some may find that strangeā¦ its not. The UX (User Experience) is hard to get right and it takes time. Part of the problem is that youāre selling to a multi-cultural market so what may be common sense to one group, may not to others.
Sometimes its the little thingsā¦ like selecting the date format on the clockā¦ thereās no mm/dd/yyyy which is an American thing.
Other issue is the BT/Wi-Fi thing.
They support only one series of dongles. BT 4.2 and the dongle comes out of South Korea. No other dongle is supported. This is one area that would have been an advantage since they could have supported separate dongles and then allow the user the ability to upgrade if they allowed multiple drivers.
Note: Iām over simplifying itā¦ there are still some challenges.
Rose is still considered a young company ā¦ and they are slowly learning.
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To have everything ālined upā as @Smegel rightly adds up would imply having a clear marketing (or - at minimum - a āgo to marketā) plan and the appropriate resources to execute it.
Even in market categories such as hi-fi and computer hardware where - as a business - you are dependant on dealers and a staged pattern to a new product launch - there are many ways to develop engagement with your customers, let alone with the even more valuable āfan boysā such as @StandardModel who - in theory - should be the first to be engaged.
Funnily enough customer centric businesses also run the type of websites which do not function as a passive shop window, but as another active and powerful tool of customer engagement.
But - once again - IMHO - itās a matter of business culture.
Either you have it or - such as it is in this case - you donāt.
Smegel,
Your points are all good. However, other companies manage it e.g. Eversolo, Wiim and others.
They have software that is intuitive and logical, updates monthly, listen to the user base etc.
In my time as an EE patent attorney, Iāve examined a fair bit of software, user interfaces and decision trees. While Iād give an excellent rating for stability and I like the graphics, the decision tree needs a lot of work. Basic file indexing and search functions are missing. Organization seems as if the individual subprograms were designed by different teams who didnāt communicate with each other so there isnāt consistency of commands between subprograms. Rose took a year off to improve the indexing speed. A year? The ability of a user to configure the software to his/her preferences is limited. Progress in adding other services is agonizingly slow- see Amazon music.
Still, there is a great deal of potential for HiFi Rose and Iām committed to the brand.
StandardModel
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With the current strategy thereās a gap. YT Reviewers that will do the review will always give a glowing review so that they continue to get product and then content from the company. Some end up becoming what we call āshillsā where they never expose or express a products warts.
That said, there is kind of a happy medium.
The company can engage ābrand ambassadorsā. That would be the āfanboisā in each region to augment their sales staff. So thereās a Rose USA, but you could have fanbois/ambassadors in various regions / states.
If not customer facingā¦ at least evaluating products to provide honest feedback.
Smegel,
Youāve touched on another issue. In the United States HiFi Rose is represented by MoFi Distribution . Although a large organization that represents many well known brands, Iām not convinced they do a good job in representing HiFi Rose. My experience has not been positive with them. I think HiFi Rose gets lost in all their brands and doesnāt get the attention it deserves from MoFi.
StandardModel
As a Sofware Engineer w over 40yrs in ITā¦ I agree, howeverā¦ thereās a lot more that goes into the UX/UI design.
Oh I do agree that there are design issues that are missed. And Hifi Rose is not alone. I can look at other products like iBasso for exampleā¦ No product is perfect.
What you donāt see is how the sausage is being made.
You have a team, and they have a list of features and bug fixes that they have to work thru. Product owners then prioritize the list based on requirements and ease of implementation. (This gets into the Agile workflow process.)
The issue is that you donāt know the size of the Rose Team, or their actual expertise.
Not all software developers are the sameā¦
We both agree as to the potential of Rose.
I donāt see them as an uber high end brandā¦ (sorry HiFi Rose) but I do see them as a top contender in the middle tier. (WiiM, Eversolo, SMSL) are punching up from the lower tier and its gaffs or gaps in the UX that hurt Rose.
Smegel,
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
I understand and agree with everything you wrote. Still, execution is key and some do execution better than others. My issue as I stated is that there is a clear lack of coordination among software teams and it shows. I have absolutely no inside knowledge but from the final result, the software looks like it was written by one or more subcontractors who didnāt coordinate their work.
StandardModel
That would be a hard task for them. While (sorry, but thatās just truth) they all sound the same, the competition is on design, features, and price (not necessarily in that order, of course). Rose prices itself at the level of lower-mid class brands (Lumin, Matrix and their ilk ā basically, competently assembled from off-the-shelf parts devices in pretty boxes) without having their software quality or customer support, and significantly above Wiims and BlueOS systems (just as good sound, better design where it counts, working software, but no āhigh-endā pretensions). They have the screen as the distinguishing feature, but that will only get you so far.
And the competitors at least employ some common sense. When Lumin or Matrix release a device with an SFP for a fiber connection (no, you donāt need it, but OK, if people want to pay for it, why notā¦) they add a second network port, in addition to the standard RJ45. That at least costs extra. Rose simply replaces the one and only port with SFP jack (costs them less) but charges more for itā¦ 
My understanding was that the SPF connection was an interconnect and required a special cable to connect to other ROSE equipment and not a networking port.
RS-130 has two, one that uses fiber for a USB connection, which, while not really necessary per se would at least galvanically isolate the USB connection. And another one, which is your generic run of the mill SFP that serves as the only wired network connection on the device. If it were at least an SFP+ one could argue that you could load music on RS-130ās internal storage faster, if you had a 10G network. But no, itās just a generic (specced for copper only, at that) SFP slot.
Boris you mean to say your home network isnāt 10GbE ?
Iāve been running this now for 4yrs when I built my last cluster for my home office.
Iād be running 100GbE for my cluster subnet but couldnāt justify it since Iām not replicating customerās environment.
