Bill Matthies

(New) Consumer Electronics: Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile!
August 22, 2007

I recently asked my 24-year-old, college-educated, marathon-running son what he considers his most valuable CE product. Guess what he said. Here’s a guy deep into music with an 80GB iPod, a Shuffle, speakers connected to his PC and a great car stereo, and his answer was his Garmin Forerunner, a wrist-worn GPS device that keeps track of his running.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a very cool product, but I asked him what his favorite CE product was thinking “CE” as I knew it to be. Of course, therein lies the problem. While CE companies sell to all of us, they must never lose sight of the fact that the new consumers may not be like the old and that change is happening RIGHT NOW.    

Back in my day (God, I swore I’d never say that) the world was much simpler. Whomever led in future CE world would be one of “us”: one of the then-leading CE companies which included, among many others, Pioneer, Sony, Panasonic, Audiovox, Alpine, Kenwood, Kraco, Toshiba, Teac, Jensen, JBL and so on. Certainly not Apple, Dell, Linksys, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc. No way! Had they existed, the computer-oriented ones among them would have been part of the business world while the game stuff would have been expected to come from existing real CE companies as did occur with PlayStation but did not with the other game platforms and certainly not the software. Yes, life was much simpler then.

Go back to circa 1950 and imagine who consumers would have named were they asked to name vehicle manufacturers. Who did they want to buy from? Easy: Ford, Chevrolet, Buick, Dodge, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Cadillac along with a smattering of other American brands. There might have been one or two mentions of Mercedes, and possibly a Volkswagen or two, but certainly no Toyotas, Nissans, Mazdas, Audis and the like, not to mention Hyundais, Kias and Daewoos.

Now do the same thing again, this time in 1985. How about 1995, 2005? What will the vehicle “brand landscape” be like in 2015, a mere eight years from now? Get the picture? Complete market upheaval in your lifetime, and for many whose careers were in the automotive sector during this time, complete market upheaval during their career.

So now look at CE circa 1950 and what brands do you see? RCA, GE, Admiral, Magnavox and possibly a few others, but none of the brands I previously listed as being from “my day.” No, you have to jump to the late ’70s to see the brands that so completely dominated what was becoming the new “CE.”

How did they do that so quickly? There are many reasons, but among them is the fact that they did not recognize then-accepted industry norms, not in the products they developed, how they brought them to market or in almost any other meaningful way. In the process, they overtook established companies who were blind to the sea of change that ultimately washed over them. The newcomers basically reinvented the category and emerged on top by having done so. 

Sound familiar? It should because it is happening today just as it did back then. A new crop of companies are bringing a new crop of products to a new generation of very receptive consumers. These new products range from the (now) obvious, such as Apple’s iPod, to the not so obvious, such as my son’s new favorite CE product, Garmin’s Forerunner. Things we never would have envisioned in 1990, not to mention 1980, are coming from companies we either didn’t expect to do such things, had never heard of, or often companies that did not even exist — companies you will undoubtedly see more of at future CES’s.

The point? Nothing is forever, and even if it was, in the CE world, “forever” is at best five years tops. Take off the “blindfold” of “how we do things.” What you did yesterday is of little interest to anyone other than possibly your mother, and I wouldn’t put it past even her to buy the “next big thing” from some company you’ve not yet heard of.

Bill Matthies is the president of Coyote Insight (www.coyoteinsight.com) and can be reached at (714) 726-2901 or wmatthies@coyoteinsight.com 

Posted by Bill Matthies on August 22, 2007 | Comments (0)