Sony Case: Battling The Marketing Environments: Perfect Storm

Sony Case: Battling the Marketing Environments “Perfect Storm”
Introduction: Sony once ruled the media and electronics industry with their PlayStation, Walkman’s, and CD’s. As competitors around Sony started innovating Sony failed to adapt and fell behind in the competition. Samsung replaced Sony as the worlds largest consumer electronics company. Sony’s slogan was “Be Moved”, but the only place people were moving was to companies like Amazon, Apple, and Samsung. Samsung and Apple had revenues of $180 billion, while Sony’s bonds were being downgraded to junk status by Moody’s. This all happened because Sony failed to innovate their products. They focused on standalone hardware, instead of creating the next generation technology which involved

The microenvironmental factors that have affected Sony since 2000 more than any other are the company itself, customers, and competitors. The company itself is the biggest microenvironmental factor, because they did not understand customer needs and how to create value for the customer. Next, is the competitors such as Apple, Samsung, and LG. Sony did not gain a strategic advantage by placing their products better in the mindset of customers. The competitors innovated and introduced new product lines that they marketed well, while Sony was left to play catchup. Finally, obviously the customer plays an important role in the microenvironment. Sony did not understand their customers and their needs. The macroenvironmental factors that affected Sony since that time are Economic, Natural, and Technological. Just as soon as Sony was about to turn around their business, and had gained $3.3 billion in revenue, the great recession hit. This caused Sony to lose $1 billion. Natural factors such tsunamis, riots, and floods caused shortage of resources. Sony was not able to make the products they needed due to unavailable resources which caused them to lose money. Finally, Sony had the technology they needed to innovate in place such as the itunes situation stated above, but they did not take advantage. They did not create something exciting using the technology available to them, therefore they

Since, Sony has failed to change with the times, competition such as Amazon and Apple have adapted. They stand in the way of Sony, as Sony needs to catch up against them. There are also economic and environmental factors that always play a role. Another recession could cause Sony to lose money again or even another downturn in the economy. The environment is never predictable, therefore natural disasters could cause Sony to lose profits like before. If Sony could innovate and avoid environmental pitfalls, they might be able to catch the consumers attention. The recommendations that I would tell Kenichiro Yoshida, who is the new CEO of Sony, is to use different technologies to innovate. This means using user interface and things like artificial intelligence to anticipate what the consumer needs. I would tell the CEO to get ahead of market trends so that he is aware of the change in consumer needs. In addition, the CEO always has to be aware of new opportunities, so he can take advantage of them, and threats so he can avoid