What does the Sony brand bring to mind? For me it’s overwhelmingly the Walkman and Playstation, two category-busting products so powerful they’ve become part of the English language. For you it might be cameras (still or video), TVs, hi-fi, PCs, mobile phones, movies, music…the list is long.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. A great company, with a great animating vision at its heart, is very likely to find itself doing more than one thing and there’s no law to say that it can’t do them very well indeed. Sony’s massive consumer offer does not make the brand less respected in professional video and photography, for example.
Yet somehow the Sony brand does not shine as brightly as it once did. I believe the reason is precisely that its products are over-branded, existing in a parasitic relationship to the corporate name. Bravia, Vaio, Cybershot, Walkman, Playstation…the energy and resource that goes into fashioning these champion product brands is partly gained at the expense of the parent. There is no doubt that ‘Sony’ adds lustre to all of these. It’s impossible, in fact, to imagine Bravia or Vaio without Sony in front. This may be less so for Playstation.
The issue seems to be one of, for want of a better word, philosophy. As a group essentially unified around two poles, technology and entertainment, frequently responsible for launching new product categories as well as products per se, Sony may often question the role of the group brand in motivating buyers in different product segments. Depending on the primary buying group, the Sony brand may enjoy more or less perceived esteem and relevance. Where these are relatively low, as with new category products such as Playstation, there must be a temptation to develop a strong brand to command a share of mind and wallet. Unfortunately the stronger this brand becomes, the more it saps the energy of the group brand, making it increasingly a formal ‘umbrella’ rather than itself a motivating and exciting presence in the product’s allure.
Groups like Unilever or P&G whose brand portfolios are crowded with strongly contrasted products and product types, linked only by high level associations and competencies, have a reason to maintain brand equity where it already exists – ie, in the product brands they own. The relative ‘quietness’ of the corporate presence is sensible, given the concentration of expertise within these groups around the individual brands within the portfolio. There is no automatic synergy between these products, either – a deodorant and a breakfast food may be bought in the same supermarket but the fact that one group is responsible for making them is of very little consequence to consumers. Sony products, by contrast, often can be used in combination: video from a camcorder can be played on a TV screen or uploaded to a computer hard drive, for example. Unfortunately, with Sony, one gets the impression that the product divisions practice a kind of brand tribalism, dedicating themselves to the totem of Bravia, Vaio or Playstation and only incidentally acknowledging the presence of the ‘parent’ despite being a wholly owned and legitimate offspring of the group.
In terms of consumer perception Sony has lately begun trying to establish an explicit positioning that unites all its many products and activities. The formula ‘make • believe’ seems to aim at conveying the relevance to consumers of Sony’s technology + entertainment expertise in a would-be inspirationally abstract (some might say poetic) phrase. I hate to say it but this strikes my ear as dangerously close to trivialising Sony. ‘Make believe’ after all, is a pre-existing concept in English, the resonances of which include insufficiency, sketchiness, provisionality, transience, immaturity and unreality. Writing it slightly differently, with a punctuating dot separating the two terms cannot entirely cancel all these negative resonances, at least for native English speakers. To be honest, although less economical, ‘making is believing’ would be a more powerful way of encapsulating this message, playing off the commonplace idea ‘seeing is believing’ in a way that’s surprising and fresh. ‘Making is believing’ also implies, more strongly yet less aggressively, that Sony products are tools that enable consumers to be creative, projecting a relationship with customers that celebrates their creative drive and positions Sony as a partner to the realisation of their dreams.
But the main criticism of ‘make•believe’ must be that it answers the wrong question. Sony’s difficulty is not that consumers can’t understand what their products have in common. Despite their variety, Sony’s product portfolio is far from incoherent or chaotic. What could be problematic, in terms of consumer awareness and loyalty, is the tension between the power and ambition of the individual product sub-brands and the Sony group brand – an institutional and cultural issue within the group.
The challenge may be to rethink these relationships and make the products support rather than compete with the group brand. This may look like a brand architecture issue, but in fact it goes to the heart of a key strategic decision about the commercial productivity of competing approaches to managing the portfolio. At stake here are a common vision and internal cohesion, a cultural as much as a technical marketing matter.
I remember the days when Sony itself was the focus of excitement, rather than its product lines. I believe, too, that those days could return, and that the company’s fortunes would only improve if they did. But it is a major task for any brand to motivate a workforce of almost 170,00 people worldwide, most of whom are primarily concerned with making only with one product. All the more reason why the energy and resource that fuel Sony’s internal, as much as external, branding should not be diluted by brands themselves so powerful that the Sony connection appears secondary and insignificant. The meaning of Sony is getting lost, not because the group makes many different things, but because some of its products have become such strong brands in their own right. Is this, to borrow a concept from economics, the ‘paradox of heft?’