Retail Innovators – Mark Hebert, Cosmo Music, With Chris Bates, TeacherZone (2018 Summer NAMM)

Cosmo Music’s Mark Hebert has seen tremendous growth in his company’s CosmoFest, an all-out music and gear festival, with 14,000-plus registrants this year alone. During “Retail Innovators” at 2018 Summer NAMM, Herbert shed light on the event’s success in an interview with NAMM President and CEO Joe Lamond.

Hebert explained that the recent CosmoFest featured 160 brands, big-name artists and clinics. The result has been an event that galvanizes the music community and creates a spike in residual sales. (Including vendor reps, more than 400 people worked on CosmoFest.)

“A lot of people who’ve never seen the store before, they’re wowed by the store,” Hebert said. “They tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends. And we see these ripple effects of sales. The first year we did it, the months [following] the event our sales were up in very slow months—because this is July and August, keep in mind. Our sales were up 40 percent each of those months. We feel it for a long time after the event.”

In the second half of the interview, Chris Bates of TeacherZone joined Herbert onstage to discuss the latest innovations in Cosmo Music’s lesson program. Currently, Hebert is working with Bates on revamping Cosmo’s lesson operation to include new education formats, such as video learning.

“In a modern world, if you think about it, there’s so much distraction,” Bates said. “The students aren’t in your studio most of the time. So the question we’re asking is, ‘What about the other six days a week? How can we engage them? How can we daily remind them to get more engaged with their practices—give them more tools and more things to help them really fall in love with their instrument’? Because once they do and they get to a certain level, then they become lifers. But we can’t do that unless they play enough.”

Check out more interviews here:

Joe Lamond, President and CEO of NAMM: Session Introduction

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Tony Schreiber of Pedal Genie

Randy Shayler of Zeswitz Music