According to Twice, a new J.D. Power and Associates mystery shopper study has found that retail salespeople across the country are strongly recommending Blu-ray Disc players over HD DVD to their customers.

The study report states that less than 1-in-10 retail salespeople recommended HD DVD to survey takers posing as shoppers for the syndicated, independent field study.

The HD disc study was part of the Television Retail Insights report, which is jointly produced by J.D. Power and Associates and Market Force Information.

The current study covered electronics salespeople in over 200 storefronts in January. Mystery shoppers posed as people who had just purchased an HDTV and were looking for a nameless dedicated HD disc player.

The survey found 25 percent of all salespeople chose not to recommend one platform over the other. But of those who did, 89 percent recommended Blu-ray, and most of them “very strongly recommended Blu-ray, to the point that a typical customer would have had to think long and hard before buying HD DVD in the face of what salespeople are telling them about the two platforms.

While Best Buy only recently publicised that they would recommend Blu-ray to buyers, the study from January didn’t come across a single Best Buy salesperson recommending HD DVD.

Only one retailer – Rex – had salespeople that were split approximately 50/50 in steering shoppers toward Blu-ray and HD DVD to customers.

According to the study, the only advantage of HD DVD mentioned by more than a few salespeople was price.

The survey indicated that the sales push toward Blu-ray “was not related to technical features, instead the focus of most pitches were on the following: 1) there is a format war going on and most salespeople felt that Blu-ray had already won the war or would be the eventual winner of the war; 2) the companies backing Blu-ray are the stronger players, with Sony mentioned most prominently; 3) Blu-ray had the strongest studio support and title selection.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Retailers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.