Sony Shrugs Off Bad Press - Still A Strong Brand

netbuzz writes "The Sony brand name took a beating last year over all those burning batteries and the rootkit fallout, right? Wrong, at least according to a recent survey of 2,000 adults who are apparently willing to forgive just about anything ... if you give them the right reason. Other technology companies, most anyway, also fare well in the brand survey. From the article: 'According to the survey, the Sony brand finished a gaudy ninth among the "Top 20 Winners for 2006," sandwiched comfortably between a couple of saintly American icons: Oprah and the National Football League. Moreover, the respondents see Sony climbing to No. 4 among this year's gainers, right above Amazon and eBay. Moral: Build a better PlayStation and the American consumer will forgive all else.'"

Comments

No brainer

[AutopsyReport]

Battery fires and rootkits are Slashdot tech news, but not everyday Mom & Pop frontpage news. It's then quite obvious why Sony still has a great reputation with the majority.

Re:No brainer

[Chris Burke]

Rootkit maybe -- Sony is right in that most people don't know what it is, and don't understand the explanation -- but not the battery. People know what "battery" and "fire" are. It was on the news a lot (for something like a product recall), and plenty of my completely non-techie-no-computer-much-less-laptop friends had heard about and even cracked jokes about Sony's batteries.

It really is that people will forgive anything, at least if there's no personal memory of pain involved. I'd be willing to bet that those whose batteries caught fire aren't going to think so fondly of the Sony brand from now on. Everyone else will just think "oh, they must have fixed it by now" and move on.

Re:No brainer

[ivan256]

People know what "battery" and "fire" are. It was on the news a lot (for something like a product recall)

Almost everybody associates the problem with Dell, not with Sony. Quite honestly, they are right to. Dell sold the batteries, and they should have tested them to see if they were faulty. They also should have designed their chargers to prevent the problem.

Almost nobody with an exploding Sony battery purchased a package that said Sony on it anywhere.

Sturgeon's Revelation

[elrous0]

"Ninety percent of everything is crud," said Sturgeon. I would amend "And 90% of people will believe anything."

It's the 10% who see through the BS that are worth listening to.

-Eric

No such thing..

[Ozzeh]

There is no such thing as bad press. If your brand is in the news and keep people talking about your brand, it's more likely to be remembered.

Sad but true..

Yep - only techies really bash Sony....

[King_TJ]

I've said for years and years now, Sony is pretty good at "walking the thin line" of how much the average consumer will tolerate and still keep buying their products.

The "techies" have been complaining about them and their proprietary, incompatible product releases since at least the era of the Sony "minidisc" format. But the public doesn't really care. If a Sony product turns out to be a "dud", it sort of fades away into non-existence, and their more successful products are still all over the store shelves, regularly recommended by magazine reviewers, store salespeople, and satisfied consumers.

"Techies" had nothing good to say about Sony's proprietary "memory stick" technology either. Yet I bought one of their camcorders (a TRV-730) which has proven to be an excellent buy as the years have passed, and it uses a memory stick for the still photo feature in it. Truthfully, when it was new, I preferred the physical format of the memory stick to the alternatives. The "SD" format is pretty darn similar in thickness, weight, and overall size ... but back then, you didn't really see SD media around. You had mostly CompactFlash, which was noticeably bigger/bulkier, and those "Smartmedia" cards which always seemed flimsy, like they'd accidently snap in half in your pocket.

They're also a major motion picture studio, releasing quite a few films the public wants to watch and purchase, and some of the slimmer, ultraportable Sony Vaio laptops are among the "best in class". Of course, the PS2 wasn't exactly a marketing failure either - and I maintain that the PS3 has plenty of time to enjoy a good success too, if the right game titles start coming out for it and the price comes down a bit. (And why wouldn't it? PS2 prices had several significant drops over the years.)

Re:Not So Sure

[powerlord]

Sony just refuses to do what is best for the consumer, be it root kits, memory card interoperability, or licensing rules like this.

You're in luck. The part of Sony behind the PS3 seems to have heard your complaints.

The PS3 ... ... includes the ability to load Linux, which makes it the cheapest Cell development platform available. ... includes support for "standard" memory cards in their 60GB model with the card-reader built-in. Pop one out of your camera and bring your saved games with you. ... includes support for "standard" flash drives, none of the previous proprietary memory card formats that we're used to on consoles, just in case you only have a flash-drive. ... includes support for "standard" Bluetooth wireless. Got a Bluetooth headset from your cellphone? Great, use it on your PS3. ... includes only "standard" usb ports, which can be used to connect Keyboards and Mice (as well as PSPs and SIXAXIS controllers using ... shocker ... "standard" USB-USBmini cables). ... includes support for using a "standard" HDMI cable (go on-line and find one for $20 including shipping and handling instead of shelling out $80-$100 on the MonsterCables). ... includes support for "standard" 2.5" hard-drives. You can swap it out yourself if you want to.

The group working on the PS3 have incorporated standards practically every place that made sense.
The few places they didn't: ... Linux only has a frame-buffer, not GPU access. Most likely either NVidia or Sony made this decision. Would have been nice for the home-brew market, otherwise I don't see the issue. ... Linux also does not have access to the part of the Hard Drive where the PS3 stores games and data. ... gee ... I wonder why they did that. Yes it prevents "legitimate" use, but they also include a backup utility which will back up most data from the PS3 partition. I can not think of a legitimate use for this that would be in Sony's interest, and would mitigate the fact that allowing access would break the security of the system, allow games to be easily pirated, and would allow a steep rise in non-supported apps, which could crash the system, propagate as viruses, etc.

Regarding Sony stance on Blu-Ray and their use of it in the PS3:

Yes, they decided to use an in-house developed format for the media storage. Since it WAS developed in-house I can hardly fault them for that.

Since even "poor PS3 sales" has already sold over 1 million units, thats quite a jump start on HD-DVD. Even if the system flops (which I hardly expect it to), If they ship 4-6 million units in North America in the next year, then they've probably cemented the lead for Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, unless stand-alone HD-DVD players drop in price dramatically, or the XBox360 add-on unit sells equally well.

Considering those possibilities its in Sony's best interest to hold on to the war of attrition as long as possible, since they probably can win it, with the help of the PS3.