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Nisreen Shocair, Virgin Megastore's Middle East president, on why the brand is still going strong.

When Richard Branson sold off his UK record stores last year the future looked bleak for the company’s Middle East franchise.

The huge popularity of MP3 players and the fact that many customers now do their music buying online rather than in-store meant record stores looked in danger of becoming a dying breed.

But Virgin Megastore Middle East president Nisreen Shocair was determined not to let this tide of change wash away the highly successful franchise she had build up across the region.

And by diversifying her in-store products to include a new lifestyle range – including books, stationery and iPods and soon-to-be-launched children’s sections – she has succeeded where Richard Branson failed, maintaining healthy profits and setting out an ambitious expansion plan to open new stores across the region.

In fact her strategy has been so successful that in May this year, Virgin signed a deal with Virgin Stores France; the license holder, to operate the Megastores in the Middle East for another 13 years – a far cry from the fate of its 125 stores in the UK and Ireland, which were sold off to a group of senior Virgin executives and rebranded Zavvi.

Describing her strategy, Shocair says: “Virgin Megastore has gone through a lot of changes, with the CD market going down.

“Our overall dollar value has gone up in terms of music sales. But music, as a proportion of the total value, has gone down to 12% from 14% this year.

“By working with us Virgin has seen there is a different model – called ‘Lifestyle’ – which is what we’ve created in the Middle East and which we hope to build on in the next 13 years.

“We see ourselves as neutral players. We provide trends and entertainment in all its formats. We adapted and last year we were ready for not one person to buy a CD in our stores.”

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Interesting report, but...
Posted by clyde, Dubai, UAE on Monday 11 August 2008 at 16:50 UAE time


It was good reading this insightful report on the chain of stores.
Yes they have come a long way. The only added input I would contribute would be to have the management that is more in tune youth trends. I remember a time a few years ago when there was a very staid attitude to introducing something to this "youth lifestyle store", the road-block was often hit by a manager who's attitude was "You know who we are, you need us more than we need you" not the kind of condusive atmosphere for introducing or shaping youth trends.

Had it not been this way, e-commerce based "design your tunes and download" music kiosks would have been ready for the decline of the CD way before Ipods were popular.

This is not @ Virgin only, most Youth targetted stores should realize and keep an eye out for propositions by people who think out of the box, and not assume that every potential partner is there to ride on their name only.

Managers for Youth based stores need to be handpicked and have more than just text book marketing and sales skills. After all they are responsible for setting trends too.

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