{"id":233,"date":"2005-11-21T18:09:51","date_gmt":"2005-11-22T01:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2005\/11\/21\/sony\/"},"modified":"2005-11-21T18:16:30","modified_gmt":"2005-11-22T01:16:30","slug":"sony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2005\/11\/21\/sony\/","title":{"rendered":"Sony"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sooner or later
Everybody’s kingdom must end<\/em><\/p>\n

"The King Must Die"
Elton John<\/p>\n

All hail Samsung.<\/p>\n

There’s a reason all the network TV shows skew young.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re advertiser supported.\u00c2\u00a0 And advertisers want to reach young ‘uns.\u00c2\u00a0 Get them addicted to their brands in their formative years, where’ll they stay, hopefully, forever more.<\/p>\n

I go back to Sony transistors.\u00c2\u00a0 And reel to reel tape decks.\u00c2\u00a0 They were the coolest.\u00c2\u00a0 They had the best design.\u00c2\u00a0 They had cachet.<\/p>\n

And then came the Trinitron.\u00c2\u00a0 The hype was convincing.\u00c2\u00a0 There was one gun.\u00c2\u00a0 You could SEE the sharpness.<\/p>\n

And, of course, I bought a Walkman.<\/p>\n

I was addicted to Sony.<\/p>\n

But people under the age of twenty have lived through none of the above.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re not addicted to the radio, and if they listen to music it’s on an Apple iPod.\u00c2\u00a0 When it comes to television, buy Korean.\u00c2\u00a0 Why pay a premium for Sony when Samsung is BETTER!\u00c2\u00a0 Furthermore, kids know Samsung from cell phones, their initial high tech purchase, what they’re addicted to.\u00c2\u00a0 Sony Ericsson cell phones are a joke.\u00c2\u00a0 Known for quality and reception problems.<\/p>\n

All Sony has going for it is the PlayStation.\u00c2\u00a0 And even there, Microsoft is nipping at its heels with the Xbox 360.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is going to be on the market BEFORE Sony’s latest iteration of its game console.<\/p>\n

Call it mismanagement.<\/p>\n

What was Sony doing getting into the content business.\u00c2\u00a0 Matsushita learned the error of its ways.\u00c2\u00a0 It sold Universal to Bronfman.\u00c2\u00a0 But Sony has held on to Sony Music and Sony Pictures.\u00c2\u00a0 The latter of which had a few good years recently under John Calley, but his tenure is history and the studio is in the doghouse again.\u00c2\u00a0 This is a classic case of brand dilution.\u00c2\u00a0 What does Sony STAND for?\u00c2\u00a0 But now it’s worse.\u00c2\u00a0 The content companies are negatively impacting the electronics business.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure why Howard Stringer is seen as such a genius.\u00c2\u00a0 There are no great victories on his resume.\u00c2\u00a0 And his appointment of Andy Lack to be head of Sony Music will ultimately be not only his undoing, but the entire company’s downfall.\u00c2\u00a0 In one fell swoop Sony has succeeded in alienating an entire generation of potential customers.\u00c2\u00a0 Who have PLENTY of other places to go.<\/p>\n

What Sony needed wasn’t an English-speaking manager but to shed its content divisions and give control of the remaining electronics business to the man responsible for the PlayStation.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve seen this movie before, with Apple Computer.\u00c2\u00a0 Slick marketer John Sculley just about ran the company into the ground.\u00c2\u00a0 It was mercurial techie Steve Jobs who resuscitated it.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, a corporation’s ultimate customers are those shelling out dough for its products, not Wall Street analysts.\u00c2\u00a0 The only chance Sony has of coming back is great products.\u00c2\u00a0 But even that has been botched.<\/p>\n

Sony MP3 players are now eclipsed in sales by the iPod in the company’s HOME MARKET of Japan!\u00c2\u00a0
iPod exposes lame Japanese competitors<\/a><\/p>\n

Sony leads nowhere.\u00c2\u00a0 And does a bad job of following up.<\/p>\n

Why doesn’t the company license its music to Apple in Australia?\u00c2\u00a0 What is it trying to prove, other than it’s an ignorant isolationist?<\/p>\n

Furthermore, there’s the ridiculousness of the music company issuing copy-protected CDs and the computer division hyping a PC capable of burning 100 CDs at a time.<\/p>\n

But what’s worst is the PERCEPTION of the company.<\/p>\n

Corporations are not much different from musical acts.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re sustained on image and credibility.\u00c2\u00a0 In one fell swoop Andy Lack and his minions have eviscerated Sony’s image and credibility.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only of its MUSIC division, but of ALL its myriad parts.\u00c2\u00a0 What made Sony a success was its BRAND!\u00c2\u00a0 Which has to be managed and massaged at all costs.\u00c2\u00a0 By not realizing this was his mission, by only thinking about the short term bottom line. Andy Lack has negatively impacted the entire company forever.\u00c2\u00a0 Just take a gander at what people are saying about the company:
Railing at Sony BMG, Disguised as a Review<\/a><\/p>\n

Never mind the negative impact of the class action lawsuit:
Texas sues Sony BMG for ‘spyware’ on CDs<\/a><\/p>\n

Not only did Sony Music fuck up, they didn’t handle their fuck-up well.\u00c2\u00a0 And isn’t it interesting that all the negative publicity has been directed at SONY, not BMG.\u00c2\u00a0 But, you see, BMG doesn’t have a stellar brand name in the U.S.\u00c2\u00a0 Bertelsmann is a faceless corporation.\u00c2\u00a0 The average person is unaware that the Germany company owns Random House.<\/p>\n

Watch this closely.\u00c2\u00a0 Sony is ill-prepared for the future.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got no hot products other than the PlayStation.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s never going to come back, it’s going to fall back, to middle of the pack at best.<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sooner or later Everybody’s kingdom must end "The King Must Die"Elton John All hail Samsung. There’s a reason all the network TV shows skew young.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re advertiser supported.\u00c2\u00a0 And advertisers want to reach young ‘uns.\u00c2\u00a0 Get them addicted to their brands in their formative years, where’ll they stay, hopefully, forever more. I go back to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-sony","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}