Brandon Dean from The Verge has written some interesting thoughts on Sony Mobile. Like him, I think Sony in some ways has always been ahead of the curve with their mobile devices. For example, Xperia users have always been treated to some of the best-in-class image sensors (though software has typically held them back) with a design that still holds true. Yes, for hardcore users, the aesthetics might be getting a bit tiring but I still find their design compelling – and truth be told, seeing how low their sales are, it’s a safe bet that the vast majority of the public has never actually seen or experienced Sony’s design.

 The Z series had pretty impressive battery life, slim waterproof designs before the rest of the market, and high megapixel cameras that could take great shots (if you work at it a bit). I appreciated their design, being really one of the very few globally available OEM’s to fully embrace minimalism. The first Z was an unapologetic 2001 monolith. It looked cool simply sitting on a table, and felt like it was from some near future. 

I won’t get into naming any specifics as our talk was purely offhand but a long time ago, I had a conversation with a Sony exec who has only gone up in the ranks about their marketing or lack thereof. What they told me then was that Sony was shifting from traditional marketing to a more social approach. They wanted to fully embrace social media and that’s where we’re left today.

 Sony spends nearly no money on advertising, with most of it going inexplicably to sporting events. You will see “XPERIA” generically emblazoned on the nets of tennis matches, or on the sidelines of a Soccer tournament, but never are the phones marketed in a way that promotes any REAL engagement. You cant see the phones in these sorts of branding exercises. 

Sure, they might be on Twitter and Facebook but that’s more of a check list item than a means to actually sell something. Nobody is looking at Sony’s tweets and saying, “man, I really have to buy an Xperia today.” Since then, it’s becoming pretty apparent that Sony has no understanding of marketing and are either fooling themselves by having the word XPERIA appear along English League matches or have no concept of what it takes to market them. It’s likely a little bit of both.

 The marketing company that produces these ads lives in some Mentos inspired antiseptic parallel universe, where everyone is a 30-something exec on their day off. Take a look below and see what I mean. THEY ARE ALL LIKE THIS. 

And Brandon is so right. Who is Sony targeting here? That ad is nothing short of garbage as it depicts a life that likely none of their clientele live.

 I live in the US and my carrier is T-mobile, so I was able to buy the Z, Z1S, and Z3 on their network. Sony for some reason is terrible at negotiating with carriers, which is strange considering that it owns an entertainment group, a business built on the back of negotiations in random rooms. Sony could never seem to get what even a smaller company like HTC was able to acheive, One unaltered phone on multiple carriers. With each passing year, Sony seemed to be more and more in retreat mode when it comes to the American market. 

Again, Brandon is on the mark. How is it that Sony can’t figure out what HTC can? You can’t even say it’s because of a the Japanese-centric culture of Sony versus our Western way of doing business, seeing how HTC isn’t an American company either. What’s more frustrating is that Sony’s commitment to the US seems to change bi-yearly where in 2017, they will defocus on the US, only to realize by 2018 that they want need to focus back on the US.

 Sony’s strategy with the recently available X series seems to be to milk profit out of the ever shrinking pool of customers. The Z series was always marked as “The Best of Sony”. It had Sony’s latest camera sensor, Sony’s latest display tech, and on and on. The X series on the other hand, replaces that flagship line with something more middling. It sits behind the competition in pretty much every way, and removes waterproofing (a feature Sony pioneered in the model android superphone) in all but the most expensive model. Comically, even the NFC chip on the devices is a compromise. Being placed on the front of the phone instead of the back, the phone renders it ergonomically impossible to use while knowing whats going on on the screen. That’s important because since Sony disabled the fingerprint scanner in the US model. 

I deviate from Brandon here a bit in my thought process. Yes, the NFC chip placement is a bit weird but it has nothing to do with the quality of the phones, nor does the lack of a fingerprint sensor in the US as the rest of the world gets it. I’d even argue that having a waterproofed phone isn’t as big of a deal as many would like to believe it is. Is it nice? Sure. But in all the years that I’ve ever owned a phone and all the people around me who own phones, I don’t know a single person that’s ever dropped their phone in water.

This doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened to you or that you don’t know somebody who it has happened to, but rather it doesn’t take away the ‘quality’ of the product Sony is selling – it’s just a feature that’s gone. Even then, most reports indicate that the Xperia X is actually waterproof but by Sony not claiming so, it removes a lot of legal and warranty headaches that they’d otherwise have to deal with.

 The Xperia X Performance is going to be priced at $700, more than a HTC 10, LG G5, or GS7, all for a phone with only 3gb of ram, no fingerprint scanner, an ergonomically unusable nfc placement, and 1080p screen. What are they doing! 

To me, none of the above is a deal breaker and instead, a very Android or PC user way of looking at things. What matters is how the screen looks or how the system runs and according to all reviews, the Xperia X’s screen is both gorgeous and apps run on it smoothly.

 The biggest question I have is why bother making phones at all if you aren’t going to acknowledge glaringly obvious things about the market. 

And that really is the big question right? I think what Sony understands is that mobile is important and that it’s a gateway to other things like wearables, which I argued in a previous piece that may be a dead endeavor for them. However, what Sony doesn’t understand is where to go next or what to do, so they keep clinging onto mobile.

From that perspective, it’s hard not to see their fear. For Apple, iPhone has been their key to unlock services like Apple Music and help them expand the business into wearables with Apple Watch. For many, including yours truly, iPhone is the command center of the HomeKit-enabled house and you can rest assured that if they do make a car, the phone will play a huge role in all of it. Heck, even technologies like Touch ID which first started out as a to just unlock your iOS device is now at the center of their ecosystem, allowing you to purchase apps, pay for goods at the store, and yes, even start a car.

By the way, that’s how you do an ad. A sprinkle of humor with real world scenarios on how to use a feature that helps make their product unique. Any would-be consumer can look at that and either now understand the technology Apple is featuring or at best, relate to the scenarios depicted. By the way, after that ad, I bought the lock shown which I now use at the gym and I’m profusely happy with it. 

The thought of missing out on all the above scenarios scares Sony to their core which is why they’ve kept to mobile for as long as they have. Unfortunately, half-hearted products that aren’t part of a larger vision isn’t helping the company either and so we’re left with products like the Xperia X – not bad, but to what purpose, and why release them if they’re not going to be marketed?

Discuss:

Where does Sony go with their mobile efforts from here?