MARKETING PLAN

Marketing Plan



Marketing Plan

This marketing plan is looking at Sony's Playstation 4 (PS4).

Internal analysis

We will start with a further review on our company to build a knowledge base by providing several information and analyses in order to understand the following content better. At first, a general overview about the Sony Corporation will be given. It is followed by the SWOT analysis and a short review on the predecessor, the PlayStation 3.

General

Brand awareness

• Place 29 in world-wide brand value ranking

• Place 3, behind Nokia and Samsung, in the segment “Consumer Electronics”

• Well-known products

? VAIO notebooks

? PlayStation and PlayStation Portable

? DVD players, HiFi, TV

Revenue, headcount and number of sales

• $78.8 million of revenue in 2009, which is $2.3 million less than in 2008

• Number of sales decreased in 2009 due to slowdown of the global

economy

• Plans for 2010: Decrease losses by undertaking further internal

restructuring

• Headcount: 171.300 as of March 31, 2009

Plans for 2010 - Restructuring

• Consolidating of TV design and production divisions

• Consolidating of LCD TV and battery division

• Headcount reduction of 30% in TV division

? no changes in SCEI

• Paycut for managers and directors

SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective. Since the SWOT analysis has internal factors and the external factors also require internal adjustments, we decided to include the SWOT analysis into the internal analysis.

Strengths

- high quality products: the predecessors of the PlayStation 4 always got

the best test results for hardware performance

- “on the edge” - support of new technologies (BluRay)

- free online gaming

- PlayStation Network Store for downloadable contents (gameplay videos,

game demo versions)

Weaknesses

- high price in comparison to our competitors

- difficulties concerning game development (complicated hardware

architecture)

Opportunities

- unique, PlayStation 4-only exclusive games

- motion control to target casual gamers (especially women)

- growing countries with improving living standards

Threats

- Cloud Computing as a new kind of gaming experience

- Could also be considered as an opportunity

External analysis

In the following part you will be presented several external anayses referring to the video game console market. They play an important role in our marketing plan since the game console market is highly competitive. After a short view into the PESTL analysis and Porter's 5 forces, there will be a deeper insight into our main competitors, namely Nintendo, Microsoft and the PC. At the end the customer analysis will end this chapter that is needed to understand how and why the goals are set.

PESTL analysis

PEST analysis stands for "Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis" and describes a framework of macro-environmental factors used in the environmental scanning component of strategic management. We added an L for legal issues, because in the gaming industry there are additional restrictionts especially referring to the content.

Political

. different taxes and currencies = have impact on ...