Brands, Consumer Electronics, Media, Strategy

The Rise and Fall of Consumer Brands

This week’s Wall Street Journal has run a great series on the decline of Japan’s consumer electronic brands like Sony, Toshiba, Sharp, etc.  While the electronics industry is extremely competitive with frequently changing technology, no one would have predicted 10 -15 years ago that Sony would be surpassed by it’s Korean competitor, Samsung. For those who grew up in the 80’s, the Sony Walkman was our generations version of the iPod. No longer did we have to carry around a transistor radio or “boom box”. We could cruise around with our Walkman in our back pocket and listen to cassette tapes or the radio.

What Sony and many other consumer brands get wrong is to assume that their consumers will be happy with improved versions of their existing products. Naturally, continual improvement is an important part of any business but is not the key to long term success.  It’s been said that Steve Jobs didn’t believe in consumer research because most consumers could only tell them what their needs are today. Part of this is true yet I would argue that the best brands are able to interpret what consumers are saying to not only understand what issues they face and but also understand how those needs are going to evolve. Continue reading

Media

Is it Live or is it on NBC?

With the London 2012 Olympics underway, there has been much written about NBC’s multi-channel strategy to show events live over the internet while still keeping the most popular events on tape delay for it’s prime time show. With the advent of social media, NBC realized that the days of keeping the results quiet until hours after they had happened were fruitless. Yet, it still needs to protect its multi-billion investment and use the marquee events like gymnastics and swimming to get people to watch TV. Thus, that’s why the Men’s gymnastics final didn’t start until 9PM and why Michael Phelps hadn’t swum the 200 Fly when I turned it off at 11PM PDT, only 18 hours after he had actually competed the race.  Is this just one more reason to move to Canada and watch CTV’s coverage live?