Sony in India had a credibility problem rather than a product problem. The hardware was good and the market had stopped taking the company's word for it. In cameras the position was starker still: Nikon and Canon held ninety-five per cent of a DSLR segment Sony considered strategically important and rapidly growing.
Three campaigns over roughly two years ran on the same principle, which I would still reach for first in a situation like this. When a brand is not believed, it should stop being the one making the claim. Give the proof to the people who already own the product, and let the evidence arrive from someone with nothing to gain.
I led the team on this account and the pitches that won it. I was close to the planning throughout, and the execution was done by people I had hired.
The laptop: a contest instead of a claim
The task was to get a laptop with unusually good speakers into the hands of the urban youth market over the back-to-school season, and — as the brief put it — to make Sony cool again.
The argument was not made in copy. It was made by asking people to use the sound system for the thing sound systems are for. A commercial went up as a custom video app that let users recreate it by mixing tracks. Then a qualifying round for what became the largest online beatboxing contest in the country, entered by video and decided by votes. Then the top five performing live to a broadcast audience, competing over a video call, each on the laptop in question, streamed through a microsite built for the finale.
The judgement I would defend is the choice of headline performer: an international beatboxer who already had a following in India, chosen over better-known names who did not. Borrowed fame that means nothing to the specific audience is not an asset.
Over fifty entries were crowdsourced in a two-week qualifying round with more than 17,000 people voting, two million organic impressions on Facebook, and a finale microsite that drew more than 90,000 visits and over 10,000 live and deferred viewers.
The phone: real pictures, taken in public
For the flagship camera phone, the same logic and a harder version of it. Rather than shoot glossy campaign photography, the brand handed the device to four mobile photographers with real followings, one each in four cities, chosen for different photographic styles so that different capabilities of the camera got demonstrated by people who used them naturally.
Two details did the work. The shoots were timed to each city's biggest festival, so the pictures were of something worth looking at rather than of a phone. And the photographers worked in public, in real time, through a responsive microsite where anyone could watch the work happen and talk to the photographer directly.
Unretouched pictures taken live, by someone who does not work for you, answerable to questions in the moment, is a fundamentally different claim from a magazine cover. It can be checked.
The camera system: a community as the product
The camera business needed more than a campaign, because the obstacle was not awareness. Buyers hesitate on interchangeable-lens cameras because they are unsure what the thing can do and whether they will be any good with it. That hesitation is not answered by specifications.
So the platform built for owners was a place to learn: workshops, tutorials, feedback on photographs, validation from peers and experts, and product information attached to the images. Every photograph uploaded demonstrated the capability of the equipment that took it, which meant the marketing asset and the customer benefit were the same object. That is the property to look for. A community that exists to make owners better photographers produces, as a by-product, the most credible possible evidence for the cameras.
It was built and run end to end — strategy, the site itself, advertising, content and the surrounding social communities.
Registrations rose from 157 a month to 760, an increase of about 384 per cent. Photograph uploads went from 390 a month to more than 1,100, up around 150 per cent, with 7,700 images posted by owners between April and December 2014. The accompanying storytelling campaign reached over half a million people organically in five months. It was the first platform of its kind for the company anywhere, and a global rollout to other growth markets followed.
What it added up to
Over the period these ran, the brand's trust ranking in India moved from fifth in 2012 to second in 2014.
I would not claim three campaigns caused that on their own. What I will claim is that the mechanism was consistent and cheap to repeat: in each case the company stopped asserting a quality and arranged for its customers to demonstrate it, which is why the results held up across three product categories with almost nothing in common.
What I would do differently
I would have connected the three.
They ran as separate programmes for separate product lines, and they were built on one idea. The beatboxing entrants, the photographers' audiences and the camera owners were, between them, a standing population of people who had already demonstrated the brand's products in public and enjoyed doing it. Treated as one asset rather than three campaign audiences, that is a permanent capability rather than three good quarters — and the camera community proved the shape was sustainable. I built the platform for one product line when I should have argued for it as the company's method.