Week 9 - Sales Promotion and Personal Selling

Sales Promotion and it's sales is a marketing discipline that utilizes a variety of incentive techniques to structure sales – related programs targeted to customers, trade, and/or sales levels that generate a specific, measurable action or response for a product or service.

Sales promotions for example includes free samples, discount, rebates, coupons, contents and sweepstakes, premiums, scratch cards, exchange offers, early bird prizes, etc.

Sony has promoted its products through different sales promotional strategies. For example after the release of the Sony BRAVIA television sets, Sony promoted them by earl bird prizes by saying that all BRAVIA full HD LCD TVs purchased during July 2008 and registered within two weeks of purchase qualify for a Bonus Playstation 3 as long as the customer claims is one of the first 35,000 received and validated by Sony.

Public Relations or Publicity relations is a broad set of communication activities employed to create and maintain favourable relationship with employees, shareholders, suppliers, media, educators, potential investors, financial institutions, government agencies and officials and society in general. Through its website, Sony corporation has its provided contacts for those customers who will be in need of any information from the company. In this way Sony can create a mutual relationship with its customers and ensure that it serves the wishes and demands of its customers.

"For example, Sony released an ad depicting a man smiling towards the camera and wearing on his head a crown of thorns with button symbols (Δ, O, X, □). At the bottom, the copy read as "Ten Years of Passion". This supposedly took advantage of the publicity from the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ. The advertisement outraged the Vatican as well as many local Catholics, prompting comments such as "Sony went too far" and "Vatican ex-communicates Sony". After the incident, the campaign was quickly discontinued."

Week 8 - Advertising and Public Relations

Sony Computer Entertainment America has a marketing character by the name of Kevin Butler who is portrayed by actor Jerry Lambert. Their It Only Does Everything advertising campaign for the Playstation 3 in North America, he stars as the Vice President of many ficticious departments within the Playstation division of Sony and responds in the advertisments as "Dear Playstation" queries.

There have been positive reception due to the commercials, Sony extended the commercials throughout 2010 and 2011. The character manifested by Deutsch/LA, the advertising agency responsible for the campaign and they also manage Kevin Butler's Twitter account and wrote his E3 2010 speech.

The reception of the string of commercials starring Kevin Butler has been met with positive acclaim due to its humorous and lively tone. Consumers love it and the results are really in the sales. Peter Dille, the real VP of Marketing of Sony Computer Entertainment America had stated that they have received conacts from the media, requesting an interview with Butler while not realizing he isn't a real person. 

Week 7 - Retailing

Sony opened the Playstation Lounge on November 9th, 2010 with their opening day festivities with a giant sized Sackboy from Little Big Planet and they provided raffles for Playstation Move bundles. The new Playstation store on the first floor (ground floor) of the company's headquarters office on 550 Madison Avenue (East 55th Street on Madison Ave) at the Sony Style Store - looks pretty posh! As well as providing all things Playstation-related, the store is packed with cool looking booths that feature demos for games and they designed the store for the fans and it feels so immersive to get one's hands on the game demos way before they get released. The PlayStation Lounge is the only place where you are guaranteed to get your hands on the all new PlayStation Move motion controllers, as well as PS3’s, PSP’s and the incredible line-up of software that accompanies them.

Week 6 - Consumer Decision Making

Video gaming as a family has the potential to bring generations together, provide experience of digital technologies to all ages, and develop social skills such as turn-taking.

WHO PLAYS COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES?

67% of American households play computer or video games.

The average game player age is: 34

In 2010, 26% of gamers were over the age of 50.

WHO BUYS COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES?

The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old. 

Jesse Schell an iinstructor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University has mentioned how there are games now for pretty much every age and every demographic. More and more women are going online. It comes down to everybody now is playing games. Games are just evolving like a species in order to fit into every little niche of our lives. 

Week 5 - Developing a Global Vision

Sony Computer Entertainment acquired Media Molecule Studios. The acclaimed developer of multi-million selling LittleBigPlanet, who joined Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios in London March 2nd 2010. They are a creator of a multi-million selling and multi-award winning Playstation 3 of their exclusive title, LittleBigPlanet. Media Molecule joined as part of SCE's global development operation, SCE Worldwide Studios.
In a strategic move to continue to secure their excellence in game development for current and future Playstation platforms, the acquisition of Media Molecule formalized a great successful relationship with SCE.

Media Molecule, based in Surrey, England, is the award-winning developer of LittleBigPlanet, one of the best-selling titles for PS3, a game that introduced gamers to the unique blend of Play, Create and Share.