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Marketing Strategy for Sony Playstation

In: Business and Management

Submitted By stefanvdf
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Sony Marketing Assignment

Stefan van der Fluit
(1122828)

Analyse issues in the Company Case from a Strategy perspective, and then discuss one of the issues identified. (50% marks)
Stefan van der Fluit (1122828)
Gaming has been around ever since the invention of computers, being a great form of inexpensive entertainment. In 1993 Sony realized the true potential gaming had to offer and decided that they wanted a piece of the cake; Sony Computer Entertainment was born. A year later, Sony’s released the PlayStation. Ever since then the PlayStation brand has been a true icon amongst the gaming and home en tertainment community.
Due to the rise in competition, Sony has to keep on innovating in order to keep attracting current/new customers. Using Porter’s five forces analysis this paper will identify the issues Sony faces in the marketplace. For the sake of simplicity I will focus on Sony’s latest game consoles: the PlayStation 3 and PSP.

Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis:
Bargaining Power of Suppliers:
As Sony is quite a large corporation this means that they also have a considerable supplier database. The advantage being that if there were to be a problem with a supplier for any reason, Sony could easily switch to one of their many other suppliers.1 In order to reduce the risk of a supplier lock -in scenario, Sony Co-Develops both the CPU’s2 and GPU’s for the PlayStation Three (CPU being the Processor and
GPU being the Graphical Processing Unit), as well as using their own Blu-Ray technology. As for the games provided for Sony’s PlayStation 3, these game publishers have some say (however relatively little) as there are dozens of such publishers.
Therefore the Bargaining Power of Suppliers is: Relatively Low.
Bargaining Power of Buyers:
Currently there are three game consoles which customers are able to choose from, Microsoft’s Xbox 360,

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