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What do you do to brand an Apple event? Apples, apples and more apples everywhere - baskets of red and green apples were displayed all over the event. There were delicious chocolate and caramel covered apples for everyone. Apples carved out to hold candles. My favorite was the special drink exclusively mixed for the speed introductions event. The tasty apple martini with a slice of green apple - shaken, not stirred.
The event dedicated to Apple resellers hosted 40 Mac vendors and 50 Apple resellers over 2 days at the beautiful Niagara Falls. Jim Estill talked about the early days when EMJ became an Apple distributor (that have since merged with Synnex to hold somewhere between 60% to 70% market share in Canada). Mr. Estill also talked about how Apple VARS should manage their business to be more successful. Peter Sutherland, of Apple Canada, showed the resellers some of the key growth areas and how they can exploit the opportunities.
Apple's growing direct strategy was one of the hottest subjects on the minds of the resellers. The expert panel consisting of George Torok (marketing VARCoach), Rick McCutcheon (sales and CRM VARCoach) and Jim Estill (President of Synnex Canada) discussed how Apple resellers could meet this challenge head on and succeed. The key is in understanding what Apple is doing and how resellers can position as well as differentiate themselves to the customer. The experts offered several ways in which they can build a solid value proposition and leverage the huge growth of the Apple brand.
The welcome party was held at the Hard Rock Club overlooking the falls. What a great evening it was as the hot live band "Erinz Fire" rocked the night away. Like the Falls, food, drinks and conversation never stopped flowing. Several delegates were also able to rock with the live band in a surprise contest and win some cool prizes.
Vendors came from far and wide to connect with the Canadian resellers. They came from Europe, China and across the USA. After building some great friendships on day one, the second day had vendors and resellers ready to get down to build business partnerships.
There were a series of exclusive vendor meetings, workshops and the expo to wrap things up. Ibiz10 launched their Mac web store exclusively for Apple VARS to promote and sell thousands of Apple third-party vendor products. The web store will allow resellers to promote everything Mac while respecting their authorization agreement with Apple. During the expo, many great prizes were drawn and resellers took away a ton of goodies from the vendors.
It was a great success and a very good start in which to build an even bigger and better Apple Channel Summit in 2009.