Emerging Technologies, Reemerging Brands
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 7/23/2001
Just by coincidence TWICE selected this issue, just about in the middle of summer, to review much of the emerging technology that has entered, or will soon be entering, the marketplace. When we set our editorial calendar, lo those many months ago, there was no way we could predict what the news of this week would be.
There is a common thread in the news from four leading manufacturers – Thomson, Zenith, Pioneer and Samsung — who are all repositioning their brands to consumers, in one way or another. Take a look at the lineup:
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Thomson is dropping ProScan to pick up the Scenium brand from Europe. (While the demise of the decade-old ProScan brand does not have the historical impact of the departure of Philco, GTE or others, it is a major step.)
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Zenith took the wraps off its first major consumer advertising campaign in decades, hoping to prove in a short time that with its new digital lineup, its "not your grandfather's Zenith anymore," according to one eager company executive.
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Pioneer has changed its company credo to "sound.vision.soul" in order to reestablish with consumers worldwide the strengths of the company.
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And Samsung has signed a marketing/technology deal with AOL Time Warner, in which Samsung gets plenty of visibility in the conglomerate's print, Web and television properties.
Sure these companies would probably have found the need to change the way they were perceived by consumers, but there is much more at work here than that. The emerging technologies that have entered the marketplace in the last few years, and will continue to enter for the foreseeable future, are forcing their hands.
The digital revolution that the industry has been undergoing is very wide and very deep, in terms of the amount of changes it has made and is making to existing consumer electronics categories. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the technology changes were, in comparable terms, few: 19-inch sets were "big screen," VHS fought Beta, CD fought vinyl LPs, and so on. What digital technology has done is change all of the industry's categories almost all at once.
This revolution has also helped introduce a wide variety of new product categories that we could have only dreamed about 10 or 20 years ago.
Change, initially to some, brings fear. Upon reflection, it generates opportunity. In the case of consumer electronics, the emerging technologies it is creating is also generating plenty of opportunities. The leaders of the analog industry have had to change their products and their approach to the market to keep up with the times. But the greatest opportunity is for those manufacturers who did not have a top market share in the analog world. If they make the correct changes in strategy, they possibly could leap-frog well-entrenched industry leaders.
P.S. – This phenomenon does not exclude consumer electronics retailers as you can well imagine. Retailers have had, and will have to continue to, change their approach and their image to the public, so they will be perceived as the place to shop for all of these new "high-tech" products that will reach retail shelves and Web sites.
A Chinese philosopher once said, "May you live in interesting times." Well, for the foreseeable future, anyone making a living in the consumer electronics business will experience interesting times. Or as that athlete/philosopher Yogi Berra once said in describing a dining establishment's popularity (a saying that for many has become a metaphor of the incongruities of modern life): "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
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