Ingolstadt, May 02, 2024

Europe's largest electronics retailer is setting an example with the opening of its first pop-up store in Germany dedicated to sustainability on May 2, 2024. In the centrally located boutique in the heart of Tübingen, customers will find a portfolio of particularly sustainable products, which the retailer identifies with its own BetterWay logo, refurbished electrical appliances and sustainable offers that can otherwise only be found on the online marketplace.

"In line with the 'Experience Electronics' strategy, our new pop-up store is the ideal opportunity to show customers live and in color what we offer in terms of sustainability. At the same time, we want to gain new experience of how we can integrate the online marketplace with its products and sellers into our stores", explains Hubert Kluske, COO MediaMarktSaturn Germany.    

The new store concept is part of the omnichannel strategy that MediaMarkt-Saturn is pursuing on its way from a pure product seller to an integrated solution provider. The Marketplace plays an important strategic role in improving the company's profitability, concentrating its own core range on selected growth areas and offering customers an even more extensive product range at the same time. The pop-up store brings the previous online-only offering to the physical sales area and provides sellers with a new presentation platform. 

Sustainable product range and lots of advice

In the pop-up store, customers can find offers from various product groups such as smartphones/tablets/smartwatches and e-mobility. For better orientation, MediaMarktSaturn labels particularly sustainable products with its own BetterWay logo. The company adheres to the criteria of independent testing organizations such as the Blue Angel, EPEAT and TÜV Rheinland and has also defined its own criteria. So-called refurbished devices, which are professionally refurbished and reconditioned, can also be purchased. 

MediaMarktSaturn's own purchase service also offers customers in the pop-up store the opportunity to simply exchange used electrical goods for gift cards. In cooperation with the provider Foxway, the devices are refurbished or repaired and any existing data is deleted. This means they can be resold and given a second life in the spirit of the circular economy.

The employees in the store are specially trained in sustainability and can also inform customers about opportunities to get involved in local sustainability projects on request.

Pioneering work in green Tübingen

When it came to choosing a location for the store, the decision was quickly made in favor of the environmentally conscious, tech-savvy university city of Tübingen. Centrally located in the city center, the store is easy to reach even without a car - in keeping with the concept of sustainability. The sustainable approach is also stringently pursued in the store design: Everything from the previous store infrastructure to the existing furniture in the store space used will be reused for the store. 

The concept is also to be launched in other cities in Germany. Further information on the MediaMarktSaturn BetterWay initiative can be found here.

The Marketplace is an important factor for MediaMarktSaturn in expanding its core assortment and offering its customers an even more extensive assortment. At the same time, the company wants to further improve its profitability through the additional sales channel. By the end of the 2025/26 financial year, the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of the Marketplace is expected to amount to 750 million euros. After EUR 65 million in the 2021/22 financial year, the Marketplace's GMV amounted to EUR 137 million at the end of 2022/23. As a country with a strong online affinity, the Netherlands is another important building block in achieving the target set.

The focus of the Marketplace products is on expanding the core assortment, which is sold directly via MediaMarktSaturn in over 1,000 stores or in the MediaMarkt or Saturn online stores. In addition, MediaMarktSaturn is further expanding its product portfolio on the Marketplace in areas such as gaming, fitness, health, e-mobility, refurbished products, trend products and seasonal products. The availability of goods will also be further improved with the Marketplace: if a particular product is temporarily not available in MediaMarktSaturn's core assortment, the online store will automatically refer to the matching product in the Marketplace.

"The launch of the Marketplace in the Netherlands as the fourth country after Germany, Spain and Austria is an important step in our omnichannel platform strategy. In the Netherlands in particular, we are seeing above-average online demand from customers compared to other countries - the Marketplace has great growth potential here and fits perfectly into our strategy, which focuses on the customer and their needs," explains Christian Kollesch, Director International Marketplace at MediaMarktSaturn.

Customers can rely on the high-quality standards of MediaMarktSaturn as the market leader for consumer electronics in Europe for the products and processes on the Marketplace. Sellers are intensively checked by the Marketplace team and it is ensured that the specified quality standards are met. For the roll-out in the Netherlands, additional new Marketplace sellers from the Netherlands were also added, who can also guarantee 'next-day delivery'.

Generative AI is on everyone's lips, in the news, on social media and now also freely accessible to everyone on the web. Some see it as a revolution in the way we will work, live and interact with each other. Others are skeptical and still see many unanswered questions.

In February 2023, an earthquake destroyed large parts of south-eastern Turkey. MediaMarktSaturn and the Turkish subsidary responded immediately and sent first relief supplies by truck to the affected regions. MediaMarktSaturn decided to expand its aid there on a sustainable basis.

To do this, the company entered into a partnership with TEGV (Turkey Education Volunteers Foundation). TEGV is one of the best-known NGOs that are experts in providing various educational programs for children in need, especially in disaster areas. They have their own program with mobile education units called "Fireflies". In the second half of 2023 MediaMarktSaturn expanded these mobile educational units for children with four themed MediaMarkt trucks and various learning modules in the areas of informatics, art and creativity. The support is planned over four years, the company aims to reach more than 24.000 children, and it includes the trucks as well as all the necessary technical equipment, aids and the educational program. 

“It is important to us to be directly and sustainably involved in our social commitments and donations - both on the company side and in the many campaigns initiated by our employees. We are therefore very happy that we can now further expand our support there,” says Karsten Wildberger, CEO of MediaMarktSaturn.

Omnichannel advantage: Marketplace sellers at MediaMarktSaturn benefit from an enormous reach, a high awareness level and a top infrastructure in the online shop, in the app and now also in stationary stores. In a pilot project in the Tech Village at Alexanderplatz in Berlin, a fitness equipment provider from the Marketplace is using around 22 square meters of floor space to present its products in the perfect light. In line with its omnichannel strategy, the pilot is a further step for MediaMarktSaturn to become even more attractive for its partners and customers.

In an initial test phase from November 2023 to January 2024, the fitness provider will be exhibiting various products across 22 square meters. The entire range of topics will be covered: from "Get started" with body analysis and consultation to "Get better" with training equipment and wearables to "Recover" with products for muscle therapy and wellness. In most cases, these are products that require comprehensive advice and that customers would like to test and experience live on site before buying. To this end, the store has its own fitness expert who provides information about the products, answers questions, assists with the online ordering process and also offers personalized fitness analysis and consultation.

In addition to the expert on site, tablets are available as digital touchpoints in the exhibition area. Visitors can thus get an initial overview of the products and technical data themselves at any time. On a landing page specially designed for the "Fitness & Wellness" theme world, the products on display are not only highlighted in the store, but also online. The purchase is also concluded via the digital touchpoint directly via the seller's online offer in the Marketplace.

"With our Space-as-a-Service offering, we want to provide our Marketplace sellers with a new platform that has a particularly strong presence. We are combining offline and online perfectly by taking advantage of our omnichannel strategy and presenting the products in the best possible way both online and in-store," explains Christian Kollesch, Director Marketplace International at MediaMarktSaturn.

"We are starting with a pilot in the fitness and wellness sector in Germany and want to roll out this concept in other countries in future and extend it to other categories that perfectly complement our core assortment. This will enable us to offer our customers an even more extensive product portfolio," adds Marius Lückemeyer, CEO Marketplace at MediaMarktSaturn.

Marketplace as a growth area

The Marketplace plays an important role in MediaMarktSaturn's strategy to improve the company's profitability, focus its own core product range on selected growth areas and at the same time offer customers an even more extensive assortment of products online. To this end, MediaMarktSaturn is continuously expanding its Marketplace offering, with around 1,000 sellers offering more than one million items (as of June 2023; an update will be provided on 18 December at the annual press conference). At the Capital Markets Day (2 June 2023), the company announced its goal of achieving around 750 million euros in GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) via the Marketplace in the 2025/26 fiscal year. In addition to Germany, the Marketplace is already live in Spain and Austria, and is set to go online next in the Netherlands and Italy in the current 2023/24 fiscal year.

With its new international Christmas ad, MediaMarktSaturn once again focuses on the topic of mindfulness and advocates using its product and service offerings to spend more of your precious time with your loved ones over the holidays.

We've all been there: you're visiting family over the holidays and instead of spending time with them, you have to set up and calibrate various devices. MediaMarktSaturn's new 60-seconds commercial for Christmas shows that solving technical problems can take a lot of time. Time that should rather be spent together and can now be reclaimed thanks to MediaMarktSaturn's versatile services. The spot is accompanied by a reinterpretation of the Christmas classic "Driving Home for Christmas" and can be seen on TV, in cinemas and online in Germany from November 30, 2023. Special forms of advertising are also planned, such as contextual placement on the radio directly after the song.

The spot focuses on a young woman who travels to visit her family over the festive period. Instead of spending valuable time with them, she has to solve various technical problems for her parents or grandparents. This or something similar is the situation in many households during the holidays. With its new campaign for the 2023 Christmas season, MediaMarktSaturn is focusing on its wide range of products and services for customers.

To further emphasize this message, MediaMarktSaturn has transformed Chris Rea's song "Driving Home for Christmas" into "Driving Home to Fix this". The popular Christmas classic, which focuses on the anticipation of spending time with your favorite people, now takes on a whole new meaning and underlines the message perfectly: "With the new campaign, we are taking the theme of mindfulness, which was already our focus on Valentine's Day, one step further: the last few years in particular have shown us that time together is the best gift of all. With our wide range of products and matching services, we are giving our customers back exactly this time and taking care of all their technical needs in the meantime - in line with our new Experience Electronics strategy," explains Michael Schuld, Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer of the MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group.

The campaign is designed according to a 360-degree approach and is supplemented with 15-second spots for TV and online, which show which products, gifts and matching services shoppers can benefit from during the Christmas season and beyond. For example, anyone who doesn't want to worry about how to transfer data and set up their smartphone when buying a new one can save a lot of time and stress with MediaMarktSaturn's Get Started service. MediaMarktSaturn takes care of the initial set-up, function checks, installation of a Google or iOS account and the latest updates for the new smartphone.

Customers in Germany also benefit from an extended exchange right until December 31, 2023 for all products purchased between November 23, 2023 and December 16, 2023.

Those who want to get their presents even faster can use Click & Collect. With this service, products ordered at www.mediamarkt.de and www.saturn.de can be collected from your local store within 30 minutes if they are directly available in the selected store.

The video can be viewed here:

MediaMarktSaturn is introducing Self-Service, an important strategic development in its retail media offering. This provides partners, customers and agencies with new and huge potential in campaign management. Campaigns can now be controlled directly by customers themselves, monitored in real time and optimized at any time according to their own needs.

MediaMarktSaturn, with over 2.2 billion customer contacts per year across all channels, offers its partners, customers and agencies classic retail media products such as Sponsored Product Ads (SPA) or A+ Content combined with highly professional reporting and analysis options. MediaMarktSaturn is now one of the first providers in the retail media sector in Europe to offer a Self-Service for Sponsored Product Ads. The Self-Service has already been successfully introduced in Germany and is being used by the first partners. Final preparations are currently underway in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria, where the Self-Service will also go live shortly.

"In today's fast-paced world, it is crucial to be flexible and to be able to react to changes in real time," says Torsten Ahlers, Managing Director Media-Saturn Marketing GmbH, explaining the new product. "With our Self-Service, we offer our customers exactly that: control and optimization in real time according to their individual needs. At the same time, we are giving agencies specializing in retail media an exciting opportunity to further professionalize and expand their offerings in this area."

In addition, MediaMarktSaturn's managed service offering will continue to be available to partners and customers, with campaign management, reporting and recommended adjustments being carried out by MediaMarktSaturn's retail media experts in consultation with the customer. "However, in order to be able to serve the 'long tail' and sustainably increase volumes, Self-Service is fundamental for us and an important strategic step," adds Torsten Ahlers.

The expansion of Retail Media plays a central role in MediaMarktSaturn's corporate strategy in order to sustainably improve the Group's profitability. Gross profit from the Retail Media business is expected to increase almost tenfold to around €45 million by the 2025/26 financial year.

With its "Colorful Weeks", MediaMarktSaturn is bringing color into the dreary season. The new, international retail campaign combines the central shopping experience with attractive tech offers. Online, on TV, at POS and social media, the colorful campaign is characterized by dynamism and joie de vivre, thus continuing the campaign platform Let's Go! perfectly. The stars of the campaign are the company's employees themselves.

Colorful instead of monotonously black: Just in time for what is traditionally the darkest advertising period of the year, MediaMarktSaturn is taking a colorful approach with its new, international campaign. From October 30th to December 4th, the "Colorful Weeks" will offer a welcome contrast to the otherwise rather drab color scheme of the Black Friday campaigns. The idea behind it: In the dark days leading up to the Christmas season, MediaMarkt stores and the online shop offer a colorful alternative and a positive setting for a month full of top deals.

The annual Black Friday is one of the strongest sales days of the year in the retail sector. This is also the case at MediaMarktSaturn. But this year everything is different. With the "Colorful Weeks," Europe's market-leading electronics retailer is offering numerous deals for five weeks in its online stores and around 400 MediaMarkt and Saturn stores in Germany. And it's deliberately colorful: "In the otherwise dreary, black-tinged month of November, it seemed only logical to us to provide a strong counter-impulse here that reaches our customers emotionally and puts them in a positive mood," says Michael Schuld, Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer of the MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group.

From October 30th until the end of "Cyber Week" on December 4, the "Colorful Weeks" will take place. The colorful promotion weeks kick off with a host of attractive offers. This will be followed in quick succession by Singles Day, Black Week and the famous Black Friday on November 24th. As a new finale to the hottest deal weeks of the year, "Cyber Week" will start in Germany on November 27th and end on December 4th. The campaign idea comes from the creative agency Saatchi&Saatchi, which has already been responsible for the campaign platform Let's Go! created last year since its launch. The overarching campaign strategy is based on the company's new brand statement and strategic realignment, which focuses not only on the product range, but also on the customer experience at all touchpoints, a wide range of services and personal advice.

"Colorful Weeks" - nothing is more authentic than the own team!

What's special about this year's campaign? The star is the team! MediaMarktSaturn is putting its own employees in the spotlight. They were able to apply with creative photos and videos via a casting platform for all countries in which the company is active. The aim was to create a mix that was as representative as possible across all countries. The turnout was overwhelming: In the end, 40 colleagues were invited to the campaign shoot. Here, over 350 motifs and ten moving image sequences were created for online, TV and social media.

"Basically, the own team brings the most authenticity and credibility to a retail campaign," says Michael Schuld. "The joy in our work and the passion for the company is palpable in every frame created - this joie de vivre and dynamism simply leap over. I'm very proud of this great team, whose personal commitment has made this campaign something special."

The goal of this two-day event was to create a starting point for the structured integration and operationalization of artificial intelligence in the form of LLMs to open up new application areas for MediaMarktSaturn. To this end, 35 specialists and developers from both companies worked together on three different use cases from this area and were to develop functioning prototypes.

The following three use cases were worked on: 

• AI live advisor: the goal was to create a chat and voicebot for AI-enabled customer support online and in the market. This approach promises a new level of customer advice and support. 
• SEO optimization: LLMs offer great potential for improving search engine optimization. Here, work has been done in particular on automated SEO mark-up and metadata creation. On this basis, MediaMarktSaturn intends to further expand the reach of its online stores. 
• Hyper-personalization and digital marketing: Solutions were to be developed that deal with the creation of modules for text and image generation for marketing purposes in social media, newsletters and online stores. The systems promise to address customers even faster and more individually. 

One thing was clear at the end of the two-day hackathon: it was a complete success. All three groups were able to present promising prototypes that are now being further developed. We are excited about the interdisciplinary collaboration, the commitment of the participants and the progress that was achieved in the short time. We are looking forward to the further implementation of the prototypes and hopefully see them in live operation soon.

At its meeting today, the Supervisory Board of CECONOMY AG, the mother company of MediaMarktSaturn, extended ahead of schedule the Executive Board contract of Dr Karsten Wildberger and appointed him as Chairman of the Management Board for a further five years one year before the end of his current term of office. The ordinary reappointment is effective from 1 August 2023 and runs until 31 July 2028.

Wildberger has initiated a comprehensive corporate transformation aimed at consistently aligning the company with customer needs and introducing an efficiency-optimized management structure. Thanks to his strategic course setting, MediaMarktSaturn is on its way to becoming a growing omnichannel provider with a digital focus and profitable service business.

"Dr Karsten Wildberger has driven the transformation of MediaMarktSaturn extraordinarily successfully and with great commitment over the past two years in a very challenging environment for the industry and the company. Under his leadership, MediaMarktSaturn has consolidated its role as European market leader in consumer electronics retailing over the past two years," says Thomas Dannenfeldt, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of CECONOMY AG, on the reappointment. "In view of his impressive performance, Karsten Wildberger's contract extension is a logical decision to ensure MediaMarktSaturn's continued positive development and future success. We are pleased to be able to continue the excellent and very trusting cooperation with Karsten Wildberger. He is an important guarantor for continuity and the further strategic development of the company."

Dr Karsten Wildberger holds a doctorate in physics and started his management career as a partner at the Boston Consulting Group. There he advised companies in various industries on strategy and digitalization. This was followed by various international management positions at T-Mobile, Vodafone and Telstra. At Telstra, an Australian telecommunications company with around 400 shops, he was the board member responsible for the entire retail and service organization, product development and digital transformation. From 2016 to 2021, Wildberger was a member of the Board of Management of E.ON SE, where he was in charge of Sales, the growth area "Decentralized Energy Infrastructure", Energy Procurement, Electromobility, Marketing, Digital Transformation and IT.

"I look forward to continuing to work together and am certain that we will lead MediaMarktSaturn into a successful future together through the consistent implementation of our corporate strategy, which focuses on the customer and the customer experience," says Dr Karsten Wildberger. "In the past two years we have already achieved a lot and I am proud of the commitment and achievements of our employees. Together we have laid the foundation for omnichannel excellence, further expanded the growth areas of Services & Solutions and the Marketplace business unit and introduced attractive store formats. But there is still a lot of work ahead of us. Together with the management team, we are developing MediaMarktSaturn into a customer-centric service platform that integrates sustainability into all aspects of our business and delivers excellent services and customer experiences."