Staples Readies for Back-to-School Season

Another Staples strategy is a “strong commitment to be in stock” on merchandise, he added, compared with what he called the policies “of some of our competitors” to sell supplies at sale prices for only a short time and then not restock them.

Looking at back-to-school as “a long season,” as Mr. Parneros put it, rather than a short-term opportunity is at the heart of the Staples plans.

For instance, the retailer is bringing back its Back to School Savings Pass, which costs $10 and offers shoppers 15 percent off the prices of many kinds of merchandise through mid-September.

It makes sense because “most customers buy multiple times,” Mr. Parneros said.

That is underlined in a new commercial that promotes the pass. The spot features the 1980s song “Just Can’t Get Enough” and seeks to demonstrate that shopping for back-to-school is no flash in the pan.

The commercial shows the beating that students give supplies like notebooks, pencils, pens and backpacks as time goes by. Notebooks get wet. Pencils are sharpened down to almost nothing. Paper gets made into airplanes instead of being used to do homework.

And a boy playfully puts two pencils up his nostrils as the girl sitting next to him in class blanches.

“It’s guaranteed they’ll go through a lot” of supplies, an announcer says. “That’s why you get guaranteed savings on back-to-school at Staples.”

Staples plans to advertise about as much as it did last year, Mr. Parneros said, with a slight shift in media toward newer areas like online and social.

Another Staples strategy will be what Mr. Parneros describes as the “endless aisle,” in the form of touchscreens in departments that stock products like printers and computers where customers can look up items that are not on display.

Staples, which is based in Framingham, Mass., is also counting a lot on technology to draw in customers for back-to-school 2012.

Beginning this weekend, Mr. Parneros said, stores should start to get supplies of the new Nexus 7 tablet from Google.

“This is getting a lot of activity” already in pre-orders, he said, adding that Staples will sell an eight-gigabyte version for $199 and a 12-gigabyte version for $249.

There is also a promotion centered on the arrival in the fall of the Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft, he added, with a likely introduction at the end of October.

Mr. Parneros spoke with reporters at a Staples store that opened in the spring at Fifth Avenue and 39th Street in Manhattan, where passers-by are greeted with a large, revolving version of the Staples “easy” button in a window.

He gave the reporters a tour of the store, showing them various school supplies that are on sale this week, a Nexus 7 tablet and a novelty item called a locker chandelier – a tiny plastic version of a crystal chandelier with LED lights.

The ad agency that created the new Staples commercial is McCann Erickson New York, part of the McCann Erickson Worldwide division of the McCann Worldgroup, which is owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies.