With the “It Only Does Everything” marketing campaign for the PlayStation 3, Sony seems to be seizing on consumers’ maturing awareness of high-definition television – its features and new affordability – and the advantages of bringing an internet connection to the living room.
Halving the price of the console from its $600 debut has also helped. Peter Dille (pictured), head of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, told the MI6 Conference on Thursday that PS3 sales grew 184 per cent in the three months following the September 1 price cut to $299.
In an interview after his keynote speech, he talked about the PS3′s potential finally being realised by consumers, the forthcoming 3D upgrade and the advantages of the new Move motion controller. Q&A extracts after the jump.
What are you trying to do with your It Only Does Everything campaign for the PlayStation 3 – it seems less about the power of the technology and more about the audience it caters to?
The White Room campaign [at the PS3's launch] wasn’t very inclusive. We’re trying to get back to our roots, with a campaign that can connect with everyone and have that sense of humour. Very much a part of it was making sure it could talk to multiple audiences, so that the core gamer feels like we get them but also there’s the message that mum and dad understand why they should want to bring this product into the house – it’s not just about games it’s about Blu-ray movies, storing videos or photos on the machine, it is a change of positioning from just being a gaming machine to a total entertainment device.
Do you think people get that more than five years ago, when the Wii came along with more simple gaming. Since then, a lot has changed,we’ve got internet TV, and maybe your message can hit home harder against that demographic?
Yes, five years ago it was harder. A convergence device was tough, I think people have tried and not had a lot of success in the past. But I do think the consumer is ready for it, it seems like the time is right for this and this is probably the most-researched campaign I’ve ever been part of. We had a lot of folks in America who it was news to them that the PS3 has a Blu-ray player. Part of this is that if you’re not in the market yet for something you don’t pay attention and I think when our price-point was at $600, it wasn ‘t in reach for a lot of Americans because of the economy and so they just tuned it out. But all of a sudden, once the PS3 came down to $299, it’s in the consideration zone for many more people than previously and all of a sudden it’s like we’re getting a hi-def TV, we’re going to need to connect..and you need to feed the beast and the best way to do it from our perspective is the PS3 where you’ve got Blu-ray, the internet connection and you’ve got games. That was maybe something we were very conscious we had to solve, which is why we had an [advertising] spot about Blu-ray movies.
In the beginning, Blu-ray was hard to sell as a big plus, will 3D be any easier for you?
From our perspective, we don’t have to sell anything new. I think we’ll benefit from 3D in our division. In Sony Electronics,there’s a marketing story there, they’ll have to go out and talk about Sony 3D television, but from our perspective it’s one more reason why the PS3 is a great choice. If it’s something you might have down the road, you get the PS3, you’re ready to go, so to us it’s a great additional message, a great ‘one more thing”. From a retail perspective, it’s going to get us into another aisle of the store. We’ve been in the gaming aisle for 15 years, we’re now in the home theatre area because of Blu-ray, they are going to be setting up 3D displays and spending a lot of money to sell Americans on 3D.
With motion controllers how are you going to differentiate Move from the Wii Motion plus and Project Natal for the Xbox 360?
We’ve spent a lot of time on that over the last couple of weeks and the biggest differentiator is the technology itself – the Wii has been wildly successful but at the end of the day it’s not a very precise experience and it relies on the wand. Microsoft’s's approach appears to be no wand, no controller, just a camera, which means that your body’s the user interface. Our solution and point of differentiation is around precision, because we’ve got the camera – the Playstation Eye – and the motion controller which has the light at the tip, and the camera tracks the light very precisely in 3D space. The combination of that precision along with the button on the controller means that you’re now able to develop and play games that you can’t do with the Wii and Natal. That level of precision gives you different types of experiences like a [first-person] shooter and we can do casual games as well. So we’ll have family-friendly games like ping pong or archery, to games for young kids likeiPet , which is a very creative game. It’s a virtual pet you nurture and it comes out to play with you on your carpet using the Eye. You can give it commands, you can pet it and it will respond, you can give it tasks, it will fly a plane. We got a tremendous response to it from retailers we showed it to at Destination PlayStation.
Hard-core gamers have looked down their nose at motion gaming: it’s not particularly satisfying for them because it’s not terribly precise or challenging, it’s more social. So we’ll have games that the whole family can play that are very social , but we’ll also be able to do hard-core gamer games via a motion device that has never been done before. It’s too early to say what the killer app or signature game is but we’ll continue through the spring and late summer before we make a decision on which game is the poster child or the best one to move the Move.
