Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
At present, though, the situation with all the book readers is that they honestly don't need to be advertised. They are selling themselves as fast as they can be made. The situation may very well be different in a year's time, if supply starts to outstrip demand.
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No matter what, any company would be generally do well to generate as much awareness of their product and its distribution methods as possible,
especially in consideration of potential future purchases, as that's what all eventual sales start out as. Right now, Sony has an official website that doesn't even have a single picture of its flagship e-book reader product, nor any links to a page that would show a picture of the product, much less offer the opportunity for somebody to buy that product, or bookmark that mythical product page for the purpose of possible plunking down their $300 at some indeterminate point in the future. They don't even tell you what brick & mortar stores you could visit for a possible purchase.
Not only is all of this unprofessional, it's
markedly unprofessional, especially for a company with the resources of Sony. Although things like this will actually tend to slip through the cracks in a company of Sony's size & diversity, all of the mistakes that have been mentioned are compounded by the fact that they actually made some sort of change to the product's homepage (presumably in response to these issues) that amounted to
removing a flash menu bar which contained a single broken link rather than fixing it and "bricking" an inappropriate link, which, though linking to the SonyStyle product page for the PRS-500 (while listing that product as unavailable) actually did some duty in pushing consumers toward eventually, at some point, plugging in their credit card number in for some much-welcomed (you'd think) business.
The little things, yes; you can ignore. When taken as a whole, however, the marketing errors are indicative of a sick product line, and a corporate culture that is, in this instance, eventually resultant in failing to provide the consumer with the appropriate awareness of how to give their hard-earned Kinzcash to the Big S.
The noticeable buzz generated by the Amazon Kindle was, it seems, a much-needed opportunity for e-book readers (and, by consequence, Sony's solid, well-designed PRS-505) to sell a bunch, or something. Sony's true crime (perhaps on level with The Holocaust or that terrible conspiracy to "pull" Building #7 of the WTC) is showing no real drive to fully, or even partially, capitalize on the recent public awareness of e-book readers that they couldn't even generate themselves.
Bad website? Check. Minimal advertising? Check.
The Other Boleyn Girl? Thou dost hatheth checkethed this boxeth, kind Sir Sony of Blu-Ray VonCLIÉ IV. All of this, taken together, I would say, qualifies as f-ing up the marketing of the Sony Reader!