Exclusive | Focus is on Digital and Retail activations: Sony Mobile's Prasun Kumar

Sony mobile, one of the top brands in India has always tried to stand out different and strong among the competition. This year was a major turning point for the brand – a complete transition, announced sometime in April, from being ‘Sony Erikson’ to ‘Sony Mobile’, the brand has in a way re-branded itself. 
 
While speaking with Adgully, Prasun Kumar, Marketing Head, Sony Mobile Communications, shared some insights about the brand’s past, present and future.
 
After marking its presence in the laptop and television category, it seems that the brand’s focus has completely shifted towards the Smartphone category. Speaking about the brand’s strategy, Kumar said, “The focus of the brand at this point of time is to strengthen and establish ‘Xperia’ in Sony Smartphone and every bit of marketing effort is to make the consumer understand the fact that like Bravia, a television offering from Sony and VAIO, a laptop offering from Sony, ‘Xperia’ is a Smartphone offering from Sony.”
 
The mobile phone market has been buzzing with ‘Android’ since some time now and Sony Mobile’s Xperia, quite smartly has marked its presence in that space. Speaking about the market size and growth of the brand in this space in India, he said, “Our brand has been doing really well in that space. Growth of the category has been phenomenal with Smartphone growing at 65% CAGR consistently and Android within a Smartphone is even growing at faster space. Android today has taken 60% of the Smartphone space. We, within this category we have been doing really well and in last 3 quarters we have tripled our growth!”
 
‘Made of Imagination’ campaign was born out of the core values of Sony believing in just one fact that anything can be made real if you believe in that! Sharing thoughts behind the concept and marketing of the global their campaign, Kumar said, “Firstly, Smartphone is all about ‘experiencing and ‘imagining’, so ‘Made of Imagination’ as a concept is a creative platform delivering the message that you can do much more with a Smartphone. Our first marketing campaign on ‘Xperia S’ was launched on this particular concept and all our future prepositions will be based on this concept only.”
 
As told by Kumar, there will be lot of local and on-ground activities with Sony mobile. He said, “Since, in terms of advertising we are not much on television and bill boards we are really specific about two particular areas where we invest quite consistently and engage with our consumers; one is the digital platform and the other one is your ability to interact with our consumers at retail front.”
 
Illustrating this through an example he said, “Today we have the highest data base in terms of Facebook fans with over 105 million fans and we have been among the top highly engaged brands out of all the consumer brands in India as per a published study by Neilson. This shows the fact that how active and interactive Sony as a brand is.”  
 
Undoubtedly the brand has been seen engaging ‘real-time’ with its consumers. After its tie-up with SpiderMan movie there were a lot of ‘Spiderman engagements’ with its consumers. Also their association with Zapak for giving ultimate gaming experience, shows how the brand believes in exponential marketing. Sony also believes in ‘in-shop promotion’ where the promoters take the consumers through the amazing offerings by Sony Mobile. “We have been really active on retail activations and have always been very closely working on the entire retail eco-system. In the coming future and with the festive season around the corner, you will see a massive growth and visibility on the retail front from Xperia,” adds Kumar. Sony will be coming with some new flagship models, for this festive season, for which there will be huge marketing seen. "The investment is little though but the brand has been really working on investment plans for the coming future", stated Kumar.
 
The brand Sony Mobile has always been connected to with the youth and now seems quite aggressive with its Smartphone category, thus strengthening the brand’s potential preposition. | By Aanchal Kohli [aanchal(at)adgully.com]
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