From the time Sony started accumulating losses across multiple areas of the business, it has significantly trimmed down its retail presence globally. Due to similar woes in the TV business unit, the official announcement has been to focus on high-end models. Even now, Sony has a significantly large scale of operations across multiple industries, which require substantial amounts of investments and strategic thinking to manage.
For a brand to become successful in the current ultra-competitive globalized market place, it has to make itself very relevant to its target customer segments. Sony has not been successful in evolving the brand with the rapidly changing tastes and preferences of the twentieth century consumer. It also has been very slow to understand disruptive forces of change like digital entertainment, seamless connectivity and the impact of newly emerging forms of media and communication. Apple, Samsung and to a large extent even LG have been much faster than Sony to identify opportunities and capitalize on them.
In sum, the brand has not been in with the times as it were and it has contributed to its slide from the top. From the discussion so far, it is quite evident that Sony has not been prudent enough in managing and strengthening its brand and the underlying components of value, proposition and equity. Even though Sony continues to be a valuable and well-recognised global brand, it has lost saliency and preference in the minds of the consumers. High-end smartphones is a battleground for Apple and Samsung, with the likes of Xiaomi slowly making inroads.
Sony and Samsung, recently both made their exit from the PC and laptop business. In televisions, Samsung has clearly taken the lead in terms of innovation, range and functionality.
It is only in the video game consoles segment where Sony has a powerful and viable brand in PlayStation. What should Sony do to regain its lost brand supremacy and build strong brand equity?
If Sony is serious about regaining its lost brand supremacy, then it may want to follow some fundamental steps discussed below:. Establish innovation as the primary driver of business: Timely and commercially minded innovation is the lifeblood of success in the fast moving and evolving consumer electronics industry. For a brand to be considered as a leader, it needs to continuously innovate on its product offerings, but simultaneously knowing how to position and maintain its brand strength and equity.
Both Apple and Samsung have been successful in doing this continuously. Samsung has managed to achieve this same level of enthusiasm for its Galaxy series. Both brands generate high levels of expert and community discussions and debates at important industry summits e.
Mobile World Congress at Barcelona. To regain competitiveness in the segments where Sony wants to play in, it needs to establish and implement a strong innovation driven operating model across its key businesses. Though it is credited with inventing categories that did not exist, but identifying opportunities and creating genre-defining innovations are now much harder than it was in the past. Sony needs to understand where its capabilities lie, what the areas it can focus on are and what aspects of innovation fit well with the business operating model and how its brands are positioned.
The same principle applies to other business units where it has been lagging. Samsung has successfully established itself as a leader in the category and has continuously innovated and introduced different ranges.
From a previously strong position in the segment, Sony is virtually non-existent in the segment. In all the segments in which Sony currently operates and wishes to regain a position of strength, innovation needs to be driven by the principles of superior user-experience, advanced functionality, differentiating features and seamless connectivity.
Understanding and implementing a successful innovation driven business model will require Sony to undergo an in-depth assessment of its current and future capabilities but it also has some internal success stories to capitalize on and possibly replicate.
Standing tall amidst the ruins is the video games business where Sony has the PlayStation brand. The PlayStation 4 version of the console, launched in early , has become one of the most successful launches for Sony in the category, helping the organization reach the top of global console sales in Sony, on the other hand, is far more capable of forging those kinds of ties with non-Japanese.
At the core of Sony lies a kind of desperation to be first to the market think Walkman with something that strikes fire. For other companies, being second is much more comfortable: If you're first, maybe you've got the wrong idea — maybe the others won't follow your lead. Within Japan, Sony is seen as somewhat disreputable, a little pushy, a little flashy, as, frankly, rather American. So even in Japan, Sony has long attracted the kind of people who are comfortable with the more open American style.
As Ando points out, Sony people don't approach conflict in the closed, face-saving Japanese style: "We have open arguments. It's very different from most Japanese companies. He says, "I chose to come here, because Sony is open to ideas that were not necessarily invented here.
Gaijin have an opportunity at Sony. That's not common in other Japanese companies. It wasn't that way at Matsushita. When one critic said that Sony was willing to be the guinea pig for new market ideas, Ibuka sent live guinea pigs to all the company's top officers.
Sony's goal, according to Morita, is "to make our products obsolete before somebody else does it for us. After hiring music-industry veteran Robert Sherwood to convince competing music companies that MiniDisc was a bandwagon worth jumping on, Sony sold , of them in the first year — twice the growth rate of CDs.
For all this, the future of Sony is not obvious. If its goal could be expressed in one word, it might not be keiretsu, "systems connected," but commretsu, "communications connected. But because of the laggard Japanese economy, the rise of the yen, and its heavy debt, Sony's overall growth has slowed in recent years. Others claim just as vehemently that, all things considered, they have done very well. I would rather be a shareholder of Sony than any other company that has gone into Hollywood.
Critics like Inui claim that these businesses never made much sense in the first place and never showed any of the vaunted "synergy" that Sony was looking for. If that was the point, then the move seems hopelessly ill-conceived, given the myriad ways that movies and music will be delivered in the future. But this is an extremely narrow view of synergy.
Something broader is going on here. The issue is how you take that design sensibility of quality and service and make it work in all these disparate parts of the company.
But it is yet another entrant in a crowded field, and it will challenge Sony's ability to draw together its expertise in hardware, software, distribution, and marketing. Roaming its factories and offices, talking to scores of executives, engineers, and workers, one gets the distinct impression that Sony seems to have absorbed its deeply different acquisitions and begun the long process of mind-melding the hardware engineers with the creative types in Hollywood.
The synergy is palpable in an orientation toward technological advances, technical excellence, and presentation. Sony's deep draw toward its new businesses is likely to accelerate when and if it moves into the cable and telephone service business — as most observers expect it to.
Schulhof has been meeting with potential partners, playing with the possibility of offering a telecommunications partner a minority share in Sony's music and film businesses. For Schulhof, the big question is "Who can give us an alliance in electronic distribution with complementary strengths? He is searching for a way to raise capital free of Tokyo's debt woes.
But despite Sony's critics, he shows no sign of thinking that going Hollywood was a mistake and no willingness to get out of the movie and music businesses. In , a study by San Francisco-based corporate image specialists Landor Associates matched people's awareness of a brand with their esteem for it. If that unity shows through in its new American ventures, Sony's commretsu could become a reality within a decade. The first one is clearly video: the flat colors, the lack of detail.
But the last two - one a traditional 35 mm film, the other high- definition video - are indistinguishable. Sony's HDTV unit does myriad post-production tasks for Hollywood, changing the film to video for editing, then turning it back to film.
Last Halloween the same unit heralded a possible coming era of filmless film distribution when it beamed Dracula from Culver City to a theater in Burbank. How'd they do that? We digitized the picture, got rid of the bruise, gave him a haircut, a shave. Cheap Videoconferencing: The monitor in the corner of the conference room in the San Diego plant has something a little odd sitting on top: a flat bezel, the same color and design as the monitor, with a tiny video eye and a few microphone holes.
But when Sony's T. Brown saw people duct-taping HandyCams to the sides of their monitors, he knew there was a market for something inexpensive. GUI Video: "Want to make the bear growl? Okay, we'll drag that growl down here. Now we'll put in a fade.
It's Destiny, Sony's newest GUI desktop production video editing system, designed to be cheap and fast at mixing live feeds with images from disk and tape for "the ubiquitous electronic newsroom. Cheap for a TV station. It's a massive computer-controlled jukebox that will feed all of the bird's potential channels from one ground station under a single control.
The robot arrays with their ranks of broadcast videotapes look like an industrial-strength version of cafeteria vending machines, but they are a vast improvement over "sneakernet," the usual practice of hand-carrying the tapes to the machines for broadcast. When he walks, the scuff of his heels follows him across the screen — and actually off the screen — in uncanny realism.
In a scene from Last Action Hero, Schwarzenegger's boots hammer on car tops, guns fire, sirens wail, helicopters whir overhead, broken glass crunches underfoot — each sound in the aural collage ringing separate and crisp. That's worth it! Sony plans to release the product in the US in If we had to add another generational survivor to that mix, it would be Sony.
Out of all the consumer tech brands on the market, it was the second most talked about between and Yamaha is an example of a competitor whose survival in this competitive space has been significantly more modest, to put it politely. Sony's survival is assured though with best-in-class tech, and leading the charge when it comes to noise-cancelling headphones.
Another sign of the times is the shift from spaghetti-chord earphones awkwardly looped around a Discman to true wireless buds. The PlayStation Pulse 3Ds are among the best gaming headsets around, with robust sound, as expected from the brand, weaving into the gaming experience beautifully.
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