charlequin said:
And I think 99% of potential consumers for this phone in every territory it will be sold in don't care about Sony as an entity or "PlayStation" as a brand except inasmuch as there's some specific device they want that's identified under those names and these people aren't going to be forming opinions of the PS4 or PSP2 based on anything except whether the actual predecessors to those devices were something they felt good about owning or not.
Essentially:
Literally nobody made a decision or formed an opinion about Sony's digital cameras or digital audio players based on the phones that parasitically borrowed their branding and (now that the near-complete lack of overlapping functionality or content between this and the actual PlayStations is quite clear to anyone following the story) I doubt this case will be any different.
My point was most strongly about association vs risk to the brand, but on the latter:
I don't know if those comparisons are exactly equivalent. With a cybershot or bravia camera, your relationship with the brand more or less begins and ends with the logo on the device. And there is, I think, a completely different set of expectations there. 'Everybody knows' that a mobile phone is not going to give you a 'primary' Bravia TV or a high end camera experience. Importantly, SE's competitors weren't conditioning expectations any differently either.
Here, pending confirmation of rumours, the relationship won't begin or end with a logo but may go much deeper - be one of content consumer/content seller under the explicit 'playstation' name. Secondly, the competitive landscape has IMO conditioned users to expect mobile devices in mobile content space to - potentially at least - be the platform holder's single primary platform.
I think given Hirai's comments and Jack Tretton's comments, their goals are not served by taking a hands-off approach and letting SE throw the Playstation name and iconography around on their devices in a licensee kind of way, and build their own separate content producer/consumer relationship with customers. Whatever the risk is, I don't think that's a
no-risk situation. SCE
should be 'third-pillar-ing' it. They should be taking ownership of it and providing a well defined position for whatever this platform is in the Playstation family. People should know what it means when they see that little logo on a device, and what it means relative to core Playstation products. SCE won't promote that situation by turning a blind eye to it. If they do, they promote confusion. There is a position for this in the family IMO, but who knows if they can see it.
* Walkman is a more interesting situation than cybershot/bravia - but I do in fact think, anecdotally, there's some confusion around it. My less than techy brother remarked to me in a store about SE's walkman phone, saying 'I guess they don't make the old ones anymore'. He thought walkman was just something being built into phones now - which was a reasonable assumption given the convergence going on with these kind of functions.