Main RMI Number
408-554-4960
SCU - St. Joseph's Hall
Room # 108
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Retail Management Institute Newsletter -Winter '04
Retail Speakers on Campus
Ron Johnson, Senior Vice President of Retail at Apple
By Dzung Duong '04
Ron Johnson, senior vice president of retail for Apple Inc., visited Prof. Dale Achabal's senior seminar class.
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On Oct. 15, Ron Johnson, senior vice president of retail at Apple, shared some of his experiences in the retail world with Professor Dale Achabal's senior seminar class. Johnson has been in the retail industry for 21 years and told students, "It is a fun career for me and I care about it. It's a career where you can marry your interests with your job and have fun."
Johnson started off his career in retail as a cashier at Mervyn's, a division of the Target Corporation. Within five years he was responsible for buying and managing inventory in a wide range of areas, including Women's and Men's Apparel, Jewelry, Accessories and Cosmetics. Soon after leaving his position at Mervyn's, Johnson became vice president of merchandising for Target Stores. In this position, Johnson played a key role in developing new initiatives for branding, marketing, and merchandising. Taking what he had learned from his experience with Target Corporation, Johnson moved on with his career and joined Apple in January of 2000.
At the time he joined Apple, a retail sector was essentially non-existent. A somewhat complicated and lengthy process was required for consumers to buy their computers. With a department dedicated to public distribution, Johnson helped to introduce the commercial retail world to a completely new alternative to the traditional personal computer. Apple's marketing strategy was to place these stores in locations with a high volume of traffic. According to Johnson, shopping malls are ideal environments, and grand openings of these stores net between three to four thousand shoppers and average about a thousand a day. For those who have visited or at least passed any of these stores, it is quite obvious that they all are designed in the same fashion. With clean, black and white designs, Apple intends to create an environment that promotes a buying attitude. This strategy has succeeded, with a tripling of Apple's market share from four years ago.
As the first retailer that Apple hired, Johnson successfully implemented Apple's retail strategy and is responsible for its overall performance and execution. The first two Apple stores that Johnson launched and directed are in McLean, Virginia and Glendale, California. Today, there are over 70 Apple retail stores in the United States. There are high prospects to open up more Apple stores within the next year, as the company starts to go international. |
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