Sony Corporation

views updated

Sony Corporation

FUN, ANYONE? CAMPAIGN
SONY BRAVIA CAMPAIGN

6-7-35 Kitashinagawa
Shinagawa-ku
Tokyo, 141-0001
Japan
Telephone: 81 3 54482111
Fax: 81 3 54482244
Web site: www.sony.com

FUN, ANYONE? CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Games consoles, the electronic devices that play video games, became big business after their introduction in the 1970s. Originating with Nintendo and Sega, the gaming industry was lucrative from the start, and it grew dramatically. In 1988 Sony Corporation entered the field, although the company was slow to make a name for itself. By the time Sony had introduced its state-of-the-art PlayStation console in 1994, however, success was snowballing for the company. By 2004 more than 100 million units of PlayStation had been shipped worldwide, making it the biggest selling games console in history. When Sony introduced PlayStation 2 in 2000, customers lined up outside stores to buy it. By 2003, largely owing to the success of PlayStation 2, Sony held 74 percent of a market worth nearly $13 billion. But with Nintendo and Microsoft, Sony's biggest competitors, spending huge amounts of money on marketing and research, Sony could not be complacent. To further promote the PlayStation 2 and its software and to help maintain its position in the market, Sony launched the "Fun, Anyone?" campaign in 2003, and it ran through 2004.

The highlight of the "Fun, Anyone?" campaign was the "Mountain" television commercial. Shot in Brazil, "Mountain" showed an excited mob of people climbing on top of one another, with Shirley Temple's recording of "Get on Board, Lil' Children" on the sound track. The human "mountain" was meant to symbolize a highly social experience. Other "Fun, Anyone?" ads, such as the silly cartoon spots "Dancing Robot," "Laughing Mouths," "Winners and Losers," and "Wobble," helped to create a new image for Sony. They were an effort to replace the image of gaming as an insular, aggressive, largely male adolescent activity with a focus on sociability.

The campaign, created by TBWA\London, was highly successful. The "Mountain" television commercial in particular gained international praise. With the new focus on sociability, Sony widened its consumer base, from primarily 18- to 39-year-old-males to a larger family demographic. By making PlayStation more appealing to a wider public, Sony exceeded its sales targets and dramatically reinforced its position in the market for games consoles. A year after "Fun, Anyone?" began, Sony's share in the market had increased from 74 to 77 percent.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The introduction of the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2000 had caused a sensation in the gaming world. Sony could not get the consoles onto shelves quickly enough, and stores could not keep them in stock. Consumers virtually staked out stores that announced a shipment. According to Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, no retailer was taking back orders, and even Amazon.com could offer little hope to wold-be buyers. All of Amazon.com's allocation of PlayStation 2 for 2000 apparently sold out in less than 10 minutes. A one-day record of $150 million in sales was an indication of the success of PlayStation 2.

To market PlayStation 2, Sony used advertisements that were dark and mysterious. They appealed to a largely male audience, especially to those who preferred to spend time alone with their games consoles. The focus was not on social activities or on the real world but rather on exclusion and on the shadowy world created by PlayStation. This focus could be seen, for example, in the "Signs" trailer, part of a $250 million marketing promotion in 2002 that was included in the campaign "Live in your World. Play in Ours." Appearing on more than 5,000 cinema screens, "Signs" showed a young man walking the streets of a city alone. As Andrew House, Sony's executive vice president for marketing, explained in Advertising Age, "The lead character is almost like he's in the midst of his own role-playing game. He needs to follow clues to save the heroine. There is a sense that he's being drawn into our world."

This marketing approach was enormously successful. Barely three years after the introduction of PlayStation 2, Sony had shipped 50 million units worldwide, and sales numbers continued to rise. During November and December 2002, for example, sales were up 42 percent over the same months in the previous year. By 2004, 70 million units had been shipped worldwide. Given this level of success, straying from its marketing approach was risky, but by 2003 Sony decided that it was time to make a shift. One of the factors in making a change was the increasing wariness about antisocial behavior, especially among the young.

TARGET MARKET

The gaming industry traditionally focused its primary marketing toward 18- to 39-year-old males. Sales numbers supported this approach. In 1999, for example, males accounted for an estimated 89 percent of the market for games consoles and 94 percent of the market for gaming magazines. As a result games almost exclusively featured male protagonists, with females playing more subservient roles, for example, being saved from an enemy by a male hero. In addition, the themes of games—including sports, action, and violence—reflected society's view of male interests. Thus, the gaming industry displayed a significant gender gap.

Sony's "Fun, Anyone?" campaign, and especially the "Mountain" television spot that embodied it, represented the beginning of an effort to lessen this gap. Although the campaign did not focus on female gamers in particular, neither was it exclusively focused on males. Rather, it was much more gender-neutral than previous PlayStation campaigns had been. Although achieving gender-neutrality may not have been Sony's main concern, it was part of the change of focus to sociability and community.

Thus, the new marketing approach for PlayStation targeted a different gamer than in the past. Marketing magazine reflected on this change, stating that consumers had begun to identify less with solitary pursuits and more with activities that involved socializing. It was becoming out of fashion, for instance, to lock oneself up in a room with a video game. Recognizing this trend, Sony shifted its attention from a target market of solitary young men to a more general, and a more sociable, public. Not only were women now part of the PlayStation market, but so were entire families. "Mountain" particularly was focused on broadening the gaming market. TBWA\London representative Sue Ellen Craig was quoted in Game Planet, a New Zealand publication, as saying, "'Mountain' reflects and acknowledges the current PlayStation 2 audience as well as inviting the new and emerging customer markets to 'get on board'. It brings out the player in everyone, and hooks strongly into the idea of simple, permissible fun."

A "MOUNTAIN" OF AWARDS

"The Mountain" television commercial won more than 40 awards and nominations in advertising, most notably the 2004 Grand Prix at the Annual International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France. By 2005 PlayStation had won 26 Cannes Lions, including three Grands Prix, the most prestigious award bestowed by the organization. In recognition of its overall contribution to advertising, Sony's PlayStation was named Advertiser of the Year at the 2005 Cannes festival. As Terry Savage, CEO of the festival, noted, "When one brand wins so many Cannes Lions honours, it's not a difficult process to select them for this prestigious award. We honour a client who honours us with great creative executions over a number of years."

COMPETITION

Driven by a highly lucrative market, the competition between games consoles, sometimes called the "console wars," was fierce. At the beginning of gaming, in the 1970s, only two companies, Nintendo and Sega, were in the market. Sony entered the business in 1988, ironically in a partnership with Nintendo. At the time the two worked together on the development of the Super Disc, a CD-ROM attachment. Eventually, however, they ended their partnership, and Sony moved on to use a modified version of the Super Disc as part of its newly developed games console. By the time Sony had released its first PlayStation, in 1994, it had made a clean break with Nintendo. Sega, meanwhile, had fallen behind. For a short time, the company rebounded, with huge earnings from the introduction of the Dreamcast console in 1998–99. By 2001, however, Sega had discontinued production of the Dreamcast and had left the console market altogether.

By this time Microsoft had entered the business with its own games console, while Nintendo and Sony were preparing to introduce new consoles of their own. At the 2001 Electronic Entertainment Expo, the gaming industry's major convention, there were three undisputed participants in the console wars: Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo Game Cube, and Microsoft Xbox. Sony left the 2001 exposition as the clear champion and continued to hold its lead. By 2003 Nintendo, who a few years earlier had held more than 70 percent of the market, was suffering disastrous results with its Game Cube and had a mere 13 percent share. Microsoft's share also was at 13 percent, even though it had just entered the market. This left Sony with an astonishing 74 percent of the market in 2003. Nonetheless, Nintendo and Microsoft did not leave the business. Given the size of the games console market, approximately $13 billion in 2004, there were profits to be made even if a company held only a small percentage of the business.

MARKETING STRATEGY

The "Mountain" advertisement embodied the message of the "Fun, Anyone?" campaign. Asking consumers to "get on board," the commercial represented fun that was accessible to everyone. Shot over six days in Rio de Janeiro, the big-budget ad involved more than 500 extras, 50 stunt people, and a 300-person production team. With cinematography suitable for a high-budget feature film, "Mountain" followed a crowd of excited people through town, while Shirley Temple sang "Get on Board, Lil' Children" in the background. Following this opening scene, the throng of people began clambering on top of one another. In the end they formed a human "mountain," creating a symbol of cooperation in society. In the words of Sony, "even as countries fight each other, people from around the world are finding new ways to come together by playing online digital games on systems such as PlayStation 2." The commercial, which was referred to as "art" by many viewers, won more than 40 awards and nominations in the field of advertising.

"Mountain" was produced by Trevor Beattie, the creative director of TBWA\London, the advertising agency for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and Liz Browne, producer for the Mill, one of the world's leading visual-effects company. The 60-second television commercial originally aired in 30 countries throughout Europe and Asia in November 2003, and it ran through 2004. The commercial could also be viewed on various websites long after its original airing.

Before launching "Mountain," TBWA\London, aired four ads that served as a opening for the "Fun, Anyone?" campaign. These 30-second spots—titled "Dancing Robot," "Laughing Mouths," "Winners and Losers," and "Wobble"—featured line-drawn cartoon characters. The opening ads won honors of their own, with "Laughing Mouths," for example, taking three awards, including an Advertising Creative Circle Memorial Award for Best Use of Humor. With their focus on fun, the four spots thus marked the beginning of the shift by Sony from dark, enigmatic ads to ones that were lighter and more amusing. The message of the new ads was endorsed in August 2003 at the PlayStation Experience in London. This four-day event provided Sony with the opportunity to promote its new campaign and slogan, not simply by telling consumers but also by showing them. For this purpose Sony created areas in which gamers could play one other, thus creating a sense of gaming as a social activity. The event was covered by local television and print news, which helped to spread PlayStation's new image.

The British trade magazine MCV reported that during the 2003 Christmas season Sony spent 5 million pounds (more than U.S.$8 million) on advertising. This included a six-week television campaign featuring the "Fun, Anyone?" ads. The campaign ran during 2004, with promotions made through cinema, television, print, merchandise, and public events. Even after the promotional period for the "Fun, Anyone?" campaign had ended, the slogan continued to represent the Sony PlayStation console.

OUTCOME

Sony's decision to transform the image of its PlayStation console and of gaming, from one that was dark and mysterious to one that was light and fun, turned out to be successful. The "Fun, Anyone?" campaign, particularly the "Mountain" television spot, achieved success on all levels. Not only did the ad win a number of awards in advertising, but it also gained popularity for PlayStation and helped increase sales, thus helping to confirm the logic behind the "Fun, Anyone?" slogan.

By promoting the idea that gaming could be a social, as well as a solitary, experience, the "Fun, Anyone?" campaign was successful in expanding the market for gaming. Without abandoning its edginess and "cool" status, PlayStation was appealing to a much broader audience. As a result the Sony PlayStation further established its number-one position in game consoles, boasting 77 percent of the market share after the campaign. The "Fun, Anyone?" tagline appeared to work its magic on consumers, and in 2004 Sony celebrated the milestone of more than 70 million PlayStation 2 units shipped. With the sales of consoles, hardware, and software combined, PlayStation 2 brought in an astounding $2 billion in revenue during the 2003 holiday season alone.

SONY BRAVIA CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

During the second half of the twentieth century the Tokyo-based Sony Corporation developed a reputation as a global leader in consumer electronics, thanks to its numerous iconic products, such as the Trinitron color television, the Walkman portable cassette player, and the Betamax videocassette recorder. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, the company misjudged the speed at which consumers were ready to adopt liquid crystal display (LCD) and other flat-panel TV technologies, and its TV sales, strongly tied to its formerly cutting-edge cathode-ray-tube (CRT) technology, began eroding steadily. Sony attempted to rectify its product-development oversight by partnering with rival Samsung to produce the next generation of LCD TVs, and in fall 2005 Sony introduced what it hoped would be the industry's leading LCD product and a new Sony icon: the BRAVIA line. Among the campaigns supporting the BRAVIA line's global launch, the European effort, crafted by the London office of ad agency Fallon Worldwide, was the most noteworthy.

The European campaign ran not only on the continent and in the United Kingdom but also in Australia and New Zealand. It centered on one commercial (edited to three different lengths) that cost several million dollars to produce. It debuted in the United Kingdom in November 2005 as part of an estimated $30 million marketing push to drive BRAVIA sales during the holidays. The spot dramatized the BRAVIA theme "Colour like.no.other" by showing 250,000 brightly colored rubber balls bouncing hypnotically down a steep San Francisco street.

The worldwide BRAVIA launch was a success, although U.S. sales overshadowed those in Europe. This was at least partly a function of the fact that Sony Europe was unable to keep pace with demand for BRAVIA TVs.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Sony was founded as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) in 1946 by Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, an engineer and a physicist, respectively. When, in the early 1950s, the company won a license to build products using the newly invented transistor (an electronic device that allowed for amplification, switching, and voltage regulation, among many other functions, but that occupied far less space than the vacuum-tube technology that had driven consumer electronics in previous years), Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo's founders saw the opportunity to attract a global consumer base. Because the original company name had no resonance outside of Japan, Ibuka and Morita renamed their enterprise Sony, an invented word meant to transcend nationality (the name came from sonus, the Latin word for "sound," and was meant to evoke the American expression "sonny boy," which was then a slang term used in Japan to mean "whiz kid"). While other companies focused on the military and computing applications of the transistor, Sony found great success in applying the technology to mass-produced pocket radios. Later entertainment-based applications of new technologies—such as the Trinitron color television (first sold in 1968), the Betamax videocassette recorder (1975), the Walkman portable cassette player (1979), and the world's first compact-disc player (1982)—made the Sony brand synonymous with high-quality, cutting-edge electronics.

The company made high-profile entries into new economic sectors (including, most prominently, film production and music recording) in the 1980s and 1990s, but consumer electronics remained Sony's core business and the source of its brand identity. At the start of the new century, however, Sony hesitated to enter both the flat-panel-television market and the digital-music market, betting instead on its mainstay CRT television products and its traditional line of portable music devices. (The company also resisted the digital-music zeitgeist in part because of the threat it posed to recording artists in Sony's music division.) Meanwhile other electronic brands invested more quickly and heavily than Sony in LCD and plasma TV technology, and a host of new competitors emerged in this market, complicating Sony's efforts to defend its brand positioning. As sales began to slide, Sony was further eclipsed, in the minds of many consumers, by Apple Computers as the industry's foremost maker of cutting-edge electronics. Apple's introduction of the enormously successful iPod, a handheld digital-music player, quickly made traditional equivalents all but obsolete.

Sony's declining consumer-electronic sales were accompanied by a series of upheavals at the corporate level, and Sony struggled to regain its footing, depending for a disproportionate amount of its revenues on its Sony PlayStation video-game console as well as the studio movies it produced. Having fallen behind in LCD technology, Sony entered into a partnership with its rival Samsung, according to which Samsung would manufacture the flat-panel displays for a new line of Sony televisions. In early 2005, as Sony recalibrated its global marketing to address its ongoing sales and image problems, the company unveiled a new long-term positioning for its European electronics markets, tagged "like.no. other." In September 2005 Sony conducted the global introduction of its next-generation LCD TVs, called BRAVIA (an acronym standing for "best resolution audio visual integrated architecture"), a line that included the first products to emerge from the Samsung partnership. Of the simultaneously running global campaigns in support of the BRAVIA line, the most ambitious, in creative terms, was one designed to run in the European market (as well as in Australia and New Zealand) under the "like.no.other" tagline from November 2005 through the holiday season.

TARGET MARKET

Sony consumer electronics traditionally cost more than other mainstream brands worldwide, giving the company a brand positioning at the high end of the mass market. The BRAVIA line of LCD TVs was no exception. Sony had always depended on its industry-defining models, such as the Trinitron and, later, the Trinitron WEGA, together with its overall reputation for engineering excellence, to encourage mainstream consumers to spend the extra amount of money necessary to purchase a Sony TV. The WEGA line, however, was predominantly associated with the CRT technology to which Sony had remained committed in spite of the growing consumer preference for flat-panel TVs, and the company understood the need, in 2005, to reinforce Sony's reputation as a forward-looking brand. The introduction of the BRAVIA line was thus an attempt to create a new and enduring icon product for Sony, after the fashion of the Trinitron or the Walkman. The European BRAVIA campaign, headlined by the high-profile commercial "Balls," was accordingly meant to send the mass-market message that Sony was, as Sony Europe senior vice president for communications David Patton told the International Herald Tribune, "a committed and powerful brand," while simultaneously serving as "a statement to the investment community that we will continue to develop and market innovative products." "Balls" and the campaign's accompanying print ads ran in European countries and in Australia and New Zealand as well.

COMPETITION

The fact that Sony had not kept pace with LCD technology and manufacturing in the first few years of the twenty-first century left it reliant on exterior suppliers for its LCD screens. As a result Sony had to pay higher prices, and its profit margins were thinner than would have been the case if it manufactured its own screens, an especially undesirable position in a climate of falling prices for LCD TVs. This arrangement also fostered a perception among consumers (putatively abetted by salespeople) that the higher prices Sony commanded could not be justified if the company itself did not manufacture the most important part of the TV. Sony entered into a partnership with one of its leading rivals in the flat-panel sector, South Korea's Samsung, thus substantially lowering production costs for its LCD TVs, effective with the BRAVIA launch in September 2005. This was a striking partnership given the fact that Samsung was Sony's top global rival in the wider electronics industry. Samsung was, moreover, the best-selling LCD TV brand in Europe prior to and during Sony's BRAVIA campaign.

One area in which Samsung had not begun to rival Sony, however, was advertising. Samsung attempted to integrate its global advertising and to position itself as an increasingly upscale brand during these years, but it failed to settle on a consistent strategy or creative direction in Europe and elsewhere, as reflected by its searches for new global agencies in both 2004 and 2005.

The Philips brand of LCD TVs also outsold Sony in Europe during this time. Beginning in 2003 Philips consolidated its global advertising, budgeted at $600 million, with the agency DDB Worldwide, which already held approximately half of that business. In addition to consumer electronics, Philips sold medical equipment and lightbulbs, among other product categories. Like Sony and other consumer-electronics brands, Philips had to deal with the difficulty of successfully advertising its diverse range of products without resorting to bland imagery and rhetoric. The company's long-running European brand message, "Let's make things better," was often derided for its dullness and lack of specificity.

MARKETING STRATEGY

All Sony communications in Europe during this time were to be organized around the "like.no.other" theme, setting Fallon London the challenge of creating a campaign that was literally unlike anything else in the advertising industry. In its research Fallon had found that the primary idea in consumers' minds when they considered buying a TV was the quality and vibrancy of the colors delivered by the set. For the BRAVIA campaign Fallon thus settled on the theme "Colour like.no.other" and centered its communications on a single commercial titled "Balls," which was edited to run in a 180-second flagship version, a 60-second version, and a 30-second version. This spot indeed broke with all contemporaneous advertising on behalf of TV brands, dramatizing the "Colour like.no.other" idea with an image never before captured on film: that of 250,000 brightly colored "superballs" bouncing en masse down the hilly streets of San Francisco.

Fallon negotiated for months with San Francisco city officials and the police department in order to secure approval for the three-day shoot, which required closing 12 of the city's hilliest streets. The balls were dropped by the thousands from bins lifted high into the air by heavy machinery, while smaller batches were shot from cannons. Twenty-three camerapersons were positioned along the balls' paths (in comparison, only four were required for a standard commercial shoot), and each time a set of balls was released into the streets, the camerapersons had only one take to capture the resulting images. Fallon had set itself the goal of using only live footage, avoiding any digitized manipulation of the images in an attempt to endow the spectacle with more "soul."

The finished spots opened with a panoramic view of San Francisco and then cut to a cloudlike mass of bright rubber balls filling the entire width of a city street at the crest of an enormous hill. The commercial then tracked the balls as they bounced, in slow motion, all the way down the road and pooled in the streets below. Individual shots at times focused on the hypnotic movements of the vivid mass of balls making its way down the hill and at times singled out particular balls and subgroups of balls, emphasizing the unique coloring and bouncing behavior of each. There was no dialogue or narrative element beyond the balls' bouncing and their resultant interaction with the characteristically San Franciscan surroundings (including Victorian homes, vintage automobiles, street gutters, and sidewalks). Each version of the commercial used the José González song "Heartbeat," an emotionally resonant, lullaby-like song featuring hushed singing and acoustic guitar. The spots closed with the "Colour like.no.other" tagline and an image of the flat-panel BRAVIA television.

IN THE UNITED STATES

The U.S. launch of Sony's new BRAVIA line of LCD TVs was not accompanied by an advertising campaign as visually exciting or as critically lauded as the one simultaneously mounted by Sony Europe in late 2005, but the product launch itself was far more successful. While the U.S. BRAVIA campaign was less conceptually ambitious than its European counterpart, it was credited with driving sales by pointing out the quality differences between Sony's BRAVIA and competitors' LCD offerings. Also, the far larger amount of revenue generated by the BRAVIA line in the United States was a function of a more mature LCD market: Europeans were, on the whole, slower than their American counterparts to make the switch from cathode-ray-tube to flat-panel TVs. Additionally, Sony was able to keep pace with demand in the United States, as it was not able to do in Europe.

"Balls" was filmed in July 2005, in preparation for a November U.K. launch. The pronounced interest on the part of San Francisco spectators, however, resulted in a productive level of viral buzz dating from the commercial's filming. Many advertising-focused bloggers took photographs or videos of the shoot itself and posted them on their websites, so that before the commercial had even officially premiered, ad-industry observers in the United States were already predicting that "Balls" would be an award-winning commercial. The spot premiered in the United Kingdom in its 180-minute version, occupying an entire commercial break just prior to a high-profile soccer game between Manchester United and Chelsea. Although the commercial never aired in the United States, Sony made it available on the Internet at www.bravia-advert.com, which allowed it to further circulate beyond its target regions. Additional online material included a behind-the-scenes featurette focusing on the film shoot, information about the Swedish singer-songwriter José González, and photographs and downloadable images. After the initial long version ran in the United Kingdom, the shorter versions aired through the holiday season across the campaign's entire geographic range. According to Sony Europe's Patton, "Balls" alone cost several million dollars to produce, and Sony's budget for the BRAVIA campaign during fall 2005 approached $30 million. Print, outdoor, and in-store executions maintained the "Colour like.no.other" theme.

OUTCOME

Sony leapfrogged competitors to become the best-selling brand of LCD TVs globally in early 2006, up from the fourth-place spot prior to the BRAVIA launch. In Europe Sony increased its share of the LCD market to 14 percent from 10 percent, but it did not surpass Samsung and Philips in sales. This was at least partly a function of lack of inventory; Sony was unable to keep pace with product demand and was still filling December 2005 back orders in March 2006. Sony predicted that it would double European LCD sales in 2006 amid a projected 60-70 percent expansion of that continent's market for LCD TVs, and the company set a goal of reaching a 20 percent market share by the end of the year. Though the European BRAVIA launch was considered successful, it was overshadowed by the line's overwhelmingly successful reception in the United States, which led many analysts to predict that Sony was poised to reclaim its spot as the world's preeminent consumer-electronics brand.