Sony as Best Practice Company

Television production is an important business for Sony. After identifying European customer needs to have more energy efficient television by observing and interviewing customers, Sony Japan invented outstandingly environmentally friendly televisions. On the basis of the interview with a former employee of Sony, I will report how Sony successfully translated the customer needs into the new televisions. The below practices for this television case are used in many other cases at Sony, although not for all.

Brainstorming

Sony is well known for coming up with innovative idea including portable CD players and Beta (video). Sony’s practices of brainstorming make Sony excel in this area. What were some practices of the brainstorming at Sony for the television case? First, the brainstorming was conducted by diverse team members. The team included former engineers, designers, marketing employees, employees with the knowledge for international markets, and employees at the product safety division. Men and women as well as senior managers and junior employees equally contributed to the discussion. Indeed, Sony ended up realizing second-year junior employee’s idea of using sensors to switch-off televisions when nobody is in front of the televisions. This is rare in the Japanese senior-oriented society, where junior employees typically do not make strong comments in front of senior managers. Second, to enhance the diversity, each employee was assigned a different task before the brainstorming. Because of this, different employee brought different ideas and thoughts on the day of the brainstorming. Third, there were principles for the brainstorming such as: defer judgment (not criticize ideas at the brainstorming); focus on a small section of the product at a time; and sketching ideas (be visual). Please note that these principles are similar to those of IDEO. Another principle was to focus intensively for two entire days to generate a large number of creative concepts, get rid of weak ideas, and draw pictures of the concepts. This is similar to the Deep Dive approach at IDEO.

As a result of the brainstorming, the team came up with a large number of ideas to enhance the energy efficiency including: using sensors to switch off the televisions when nobody is in front of the televisions; a technology to reduce energy consumption of stand-by mode; and replacing lamps at the back of liquid crystal televisions with more energy efficient lamps. Using its market data which was gathered through its television business, Sony narrowed down the ideas and came up with its initial product concept.

Concept Testing

Sony is good at testing its innovative concepts. In the television case, Sony used its concept testing method similar to what we learned in the class. Specifically, it showed its prototype to customers and systematically asked the following questions:

1. Would you buy this product? Please rate it on 5 scales.

2. How much do you think you would like or dislike the product?

3. How would you rate the product in terms of being new and different from other products currently available?

4. How well would the product solve a problem or fulfill a need for you?

5. Would the product solve a problem or fulfill a need for you better than, not as well as or about the same as others?

6. How do you feel about the believability of the product?.

Interestingly, Sony did not show a potential price to its survey participants. According to its former employee, Sony did not believe customers’ opinions on price. Instead, they believed the opinion of its distributors (dealers and retailers) because the distributors’ opinion is based on their data. In addition, Sony did not use the conjoint analysis in this case.

Sony also conducted depth interview to customers, presenting its prototype. As a result of the concept testing survey and interview, Sony modified its prototypes and completed its innovative energy efficient televisions with the sensors to switch off the televisions when nobody is in front of the televisions.

Yohei