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AnchorDesk

Patrick Houston
Inside Sony: Winning hearts, not just wallets

Patrick Houston
Editorial Director, AnchorDesk
Friday, June 20, 2003
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Because I'm headed to Japan next week for a series of media briefings from Sony Corp., I was more than casually interested by the news that the company had unveiled its new "Qualia" line of super-exclusive electronics. But when I surfed over to Sony's Web site to grab a glance at the first four Qualia products, I got way more than just the usual specs.

Instead, I got a poetry recital, a lesson in philosophy and neuroscience, and, as well as an insight into the soul of Sony, its efforts at self-renewal, and what it all might eventually mean to devotees of one of the world's best known brands.

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LET ME START with the products themselves. For the time being, Sony will only offer them in Japan at special Qualia stores. But if the company opened a U.S. outlet, it'd make The Sharper Image look like a place where you'd find blue-light specials.

Get this: A $3,200, 3-inch, 2-megapixel digital camera. An $11,000 36-inch Trinitron super-clear TV. A $20,000 high-definition home-theater projector. A $6,800 Super-Audio CD player that'll play a disk dropped anywhere on its dish-sized surface.

At those prices, it sounds like "Qualia" kind of stuff, yes? Qualia. Quality. That's the connection I made. I figured it was one of those synthetic words, like Enron or Prozac, with no real meaning beyond what the sound alone evokes.

But I was wrong. And that's where the poetry, philosophy, and neuroscience come in. Sony's flashy Qualia site greets you not with photos, marketing descriptions, or product specs, but with this instead:

"The glow of a sunset can suffuse us with joy.
A beautiful melody can fill us with emotion.
Silver white and cold to the touch. Snow comes alive.
And the salty breeze of the summer sea. We have only
to imagine the heat reflecting off the sands
to smell it again.

But what makes these sensations possible?
Sony has arrived at an answer
to this fundamental question.

Qualia.

Qualia can be found in everyone."

AT THIS POINT, the cynic in me started to gag. But then, digging a little deeper into the site, I found that "qualia" isn't some synthetic marketing term. I discovered that the word is a real one, used for some decades now by philosophers and neuroscientists.

It's a technical term denoting a property of something we can see, touch, taste, or hear that goes above and beyond the thing itself. When you see red, what do you think? Certainly it's something beyond the color red itself. How about heat, anger, or passion? Those characteristics are considered its qualia.

We assign qualia to all kinds of things all the time. Car makers have known this for decades. You don't just drive a car. You are  your car. It says something about who you are. You have this emotional, sensual attachment to it. Now electronics have reached that same point. Just ask Apple. You'd easier steal a spouse than take a Mac away from one of its users. Now that's an emotional connection.

And that's why, to Sony, Qualia is more than just a product line. Instead, it's an effort to create products as pregnant with emotional appeal as a Porsche or an iPod. By Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei's own admission, it's also a way for Sony to give outlet to imaginative products that might otherwise be left to die on the vine for lack of mass-market potential. "For many years," he said during last week's Qualia launch news conference, "our engineers couldn't make what they wanted because our market share mattered most."

If I were more of a cynic, I'd poke some fun at Sony for engaging in an EST-like approach to business. Sony may be Japanese, but it's capitalist to the core, and free market economics don't much countenance touchy-feely. And the prospects for such high-end electronics aren't great, even in Japan where, when it comes to gadgets, coolness and sophistication count for more than price

CALL ME NAÏVE, but I'm actually heartened when corporations embrace the humanities. I've seen enough of greed and cold business calculus. And, from what I know of it, at least Sony isn't being untrue to its past. This is a company, after all, that started amid the ruins of World War II not because founder Masaru Ibuka saw a market need but because he wanted to give vent to the talents and passions of the wartime engineers with whom he once worked.

In our gadget-glutted world, the Sony brand, long synonymous with quality, doesn't command the 30 percent-plus premiums it once did. While it still makes highly regarded products--they regularly score high marks in our reviews--it's being challenged as never before by companies such as Samsung. And because it's now a technology company as well as a consumer electronics company, it's been forced by the dynamics of digital convergence to compete with a whole new set of rivals, including such behemoths as Microsoft, Dell, HP, and Nokia.

That's why Sony's brass also talks about Qualia as a new standard for the entire company. Any product can qualify for a Qualia label--as long as it passes a rigorous review that extends all the way up to CEO Idei himself.

Perhaps it's corporate Kool-Aid, but it can't hurt Sony to take a good stiff belt of its own Qualia philosophy. It could wind up refreshing us as well--with a new generation of devices we just love.

What do you think? Do you think Sony products are worth the premium you (still) often pay for them? TalkBack to me! 

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