Combining communication & entertainment

There is a term that’s repeated throughout our conversation with Sony Ericsson head of Asia Pacific Region Matthew Lang during his Manila visit last month. The word is “Sony-ness.” It sounds like a corporate battle cry and, in a way, it is. Lang is describing Sony Ericsson’s unique proposition and position in an industry that is moving and changing as fast as statuses on Facebook change — that the brand is built upon its parent company Sony’s heritage. Yes, the giant entertainment company and manufacturer Sony Corporation, which has innovated the gaming, music and TV industries in ways nobody would have foreseen 20 years ago. “Sony Ericsson’s strategy is to be the No. 1 brand in communication and entertainment,” Lang says. “We bring together the latest technology in terms of communication platforms and marry that with the Sony-ness that our parent company brings to us.” This Sony-ness is evident in Sony Ericsson’s new Experia Play phone, which was launched this year in the US, Europe, and recently in several countries in Asia — and hopefully soon in the Philippines. Sony Ericsson head of Asia Pacific Region Matthew Lang with his Experia Arc “With Experia Play, we’ve managed to bring the first PlayStation-certified phone to the market. We build in technologies from Sony such as the reality of the Bravia engine in the screens of our phones. Our aim is to bring together communication and entertainment, which we believe provides a unique customer experience and something that can really excite the consumers because the Android platform runs across most smartphones nowadays and we need to differentiate ourselves from that. We believe the Sony-ness we bring to the table enables us to do that.” Lang certainly knows the parent company’s core values. Before he joined Sony Ericsson, he had an illustrious career with Sony Corporation in several capacities around the world. In the last 20 years, he has lived and worked in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Africa. Before he became head of Sony Ericsson Asia Pacific, he was managing director of the Sony South Africa Market Unit for four years. He was responsible for achieving a 50-percent growth in sales and establishing a clear lead in the LCD TV market for Sony. He went on to lead the successful hosting of Sony’s FIFA World Cup sponsorship. “What I’m particularly excited about coming into the Asia Pacific region is the potential of some of the markets. In APAC, you go from one extreme to the other. I’ve got technologically complex markets like Korea and Japan where Sony Ericsson exclusively launched a phone with a 16-megapixel camera. Then there are the hugely promising markets such as Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand where the transition to smartphones is going to go faster than anybody expected. People are really going to thrive on mobile broadband, and the consumer is going to become a mobile consumer. The potential for that is even more exciting in emerging markets like the Philippines.” Sony Ericsson Philippines marketing manager Patrick Larraga says smartphones in the country account for about 10 percent of the market, and Sony Ericsson is in the top three — as it is in most of countries in the region. Get active: The dust-and water-proof Experia Active “Obviously the ambition is to become the No. 1 player in Android. What we’re seeing is that everybody’s forecast and predictions for Android are too slow. The same can probably be said for the overall conversion to smartphone,” says Lang. “So it wouldn’t surprise us that in a market like the Philippines, 50 percent of all phones by, say, 2015, would be smartphones because the low end is going to become smartphone-friendly as well. There will always be a lower priced smartphone from China and Sony Ericsson will never go down to that end. Our aim is to provide the latest version with very good integration in a range that’s aspirational. We’ve got the top end, which is our comfort zone, that’s where our heritage comes in, but we also want to get close to the affordable level.” If you’re still not using a smartphone, Sony Ericsson’s new releases for the third quarter will surely make you convert. There’s Experia Ray, a beautiful slim phone that has all the capabilities of the top-end and more manly Experia Arc; Experia Active, which is a dust- and water-proof phone that you can use as your training log for your runs and races; and the Mini Pro, a compact, QWERTY keyboard Android phone. “I have a lovely story from Australia on the Experia Active. It’s dust-proof and water-proof and we got a special certification for that,” Lang says. “Australia is very dusty and has lots of outback, and we were trying to pitch it to one of the operators. We had an early prototype and the operator was very insistent that we show him that it was really dust and water-proof. The Sony Ericsson executive who was there said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it since you’ve been pestering me for so long.’ So he put the Active phone in a pail of water and he was able to make a phone call right after. And the operator said, ‘Right, we’ll take it.’” Larraga predicts that both the Experia Ray and Active are going to be popular with Filipino consumers. “The Ray is just a physically beautiful phone that’s packing in firepower, and the Active is fun and suits sports-minded people.” What about Experia Play? Will it ever be launched in the Philippines where PlayStation gamers probably outnumber the country’s armed forces? Lang says, “It’s all about the ecosystem to support and to enable the users to get their hands on games in a sensible, non-frustrating way. We need to convince the powers that be in Sony that it is appropriate to launch it in the Philippines. We just got it into the US, which is a big step forward for us. Everywhere it’s been launched, it’s had very good reviews — the critics, the consumers and the gaming community love it, and the developers are happy with the open platform. It has well over a hundred games now and we’ve got some launches planned for the big titles like Call of Duty.” Sony Ericsson Philippines product marketing manager Vince dela Cruz says, “The PlayStation network is not available locally. Experia Play has some games built into it, but when you’ve finished with those games, you will not yet be able to get games — and that’s what Sony Ericsson is working on.” Lang with Sony Ericsson Philippines product marketing manager Vince dela Cruz and marketing manager Patrick Larraga Another thing that differentiates Sony Ericsson in the innovation race from other cell phones operating on Android is that the company is working very closely with partners like Google and Facebook, which has resulted in a “tight and deep integration” of both into the mobile phones. “We’re launching all the new phones with FB inside Experia. It’s not just sticking an FB button on the screen, but is embedded into the phone. For example, you’re listening to music on your phone and there’s a button you can press on the screen, which will automatically feed into your Facebook account and your friends can see that you are ‘liking’ this song.” The Facebook integration will surely please Filipino users since the country has one of the highest rates of Facebook penetration among Internet users. “I think we have the best of both worlds,” says Lang. “We get the technology input from Ericsson, which is obviously leading the way in the next generation of networks, and we get the latest developments from Sony, which invests a huge amount of money in research and development to look into new technologies.” But Lang is quick to point out that while Android (in the global Android market, Sony Ericsson is carrying 11 in volume and value) is the favored operating system of the moment, “We’re ultimately driven by the consumer. If the consumer changes the course then we respond quickly. Sony Ericsson is a very agile and nimble company. We have a much faster route to influence the designers and developers of the phones, which is motivating and fun. It is a bit terrifying because the industry moves so fast, but it’s great to know we can respond much more quickly. What we’d like to be able to do is to tell our developers, ‘Build us the next-generation phone. It must look cool and sexy because it’s a Sony, it must have all the Sony-ness in it, it must give people the opportunity to use all the different kinds of media Sony has, and we must make it configurable for any operating system.’” Sony Ericsson is also carefully selecting the phones it releases in the Philippine market, so that each type of lifestyle and level of budget is satisfied. That will sure satisfy any angry bird.