Japanese electronics companies, including Sony, mainly focus on the Japanese market, where consumers demand high technology and many value-added functions. Therefore, Sony, Sharp and other Japanese smartphone makers turn out products with many functions and launch several new versions in each of the four seasons in Japan, a habit the Japanese call the “Galapagos phenomenon”, because of the parallel with the unique species that have evolved on that island.
Since they are obsessed with perfecting each variation on the same product theme, the Japanese companies tend to stick with one standard that works for the home market but may not be useful in other markets. The mobile phone standard is a typical example. “The reason why Japanese mobile phones were not competitive is they did not look at the global market, but they focused mostly on Japanese market with [telecom service provider] NTT DoCoMo’s standard,” says Chang. “Samsung is very much marketing driven … but not as driven by the Korean market as Japanese companies are driven by the Japanese market.”
Ironically enough, the preoccupation with churning out ever complex permutations on the same theme has resulted in products which may be too complex even to meet the tastes of persnickety Japanese consumers.
Trouble overseas
Companies that cannot effectively serve their home market are going to be at even more of a loss regarding overseas markets. “Japanese companies did not do enough market research to find out what global markets or emerging markets would like and what kind of specific needs they have,” says Masatomo Inuzuka, professor in the Department of Business Administration and the Graduate school of Economics at Soka University in Tokyo.
Sony does not understand what US customers want, contends Cavender. “They have all these different cameras or phones, a tiny bit different from each other,” he says. Consumers might not understand the differences or may even feel overwhelmed by the complexity of choices on offer. Although it is not a problem unique to Sony, it is a significant issue for Japanese consumer electronics products that require users to navigate through complex manuals to accomplish such mundane tasks as toasting bread or heating up milk.
That lack of “user friendliness” is the polar opposite of Apple’s “We know what you want better than you do” approach. “If you organised your product portfolio a bit and made it a little bit more focused, it would make clear for the consumers what they should buy so that they actually would spend their money rather than getting confused and opting not to spend [anything],” Cavender says.
Scooped by competitors
One of Sony’s biggest handicaps is its slowness in making decisions and turning out products. Time and again, the company has been scooped by its competitors. Yasunori Tateishi wrote in his book titled, Good-bye, Our Sony, that he told Sony’s then-president Kunitake Ando that Sony’s PDA product CLIE should have a mobile phone function so a user would not have to carry both a PDA and a mobile phone.
