Excerpted from the New York Times, “For Sony, No Discounts Means Stress-Free Shopping”, by Saul Hansell, November 20, 2008
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Eliminating price competition among retailers for high-end cameras and TVs is a great benefit for consumers — so say Sony executives .
Sony bans retailers from discounting Sony’s Alpha digital camera line, its more expensive televisions and some other high-end products. They claim that by having the price for these products be the same at all retailers, they eliminate stress for buyers.
“Consumers don’t have to worry about whether I can get a better deal at retailer A or retailer B. Everybody gets the best deal.” Stores can now compete on other attributes, like education and support.
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A quick scan of photography blogs does not find much gratitude for all the stress that Sony has saved camera buyers. On a blog dedicated to Sony’s cameras, some posters complain about the price of cameras and accessories increasing by hundreds of dollars. The program has been controversial, even among electronics dealers
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Sony is increasing promotions in retail stores, but was not cutting the prices it planned for the holiday season. “There was value planned in the product,” said Sony execs, “That value is there. Whether consumers will take advantage of it is another question. But we don’t think that dropping the price alone will add traffic.”
Edit by DAF
The Homa Files 
January 9, 2009 at 4:38 pm |
“Everybody gets the best deal,” eh? It seems that Sir Howie Stringer & co. may just be throwing darts, desperate to help Sony get its mojo back. The company needs to re-establish its identity as the expert in and go-to maker of consumer electronics. PlayStation alone kept Sony afloat in recent years, but now XBox and, more recently, Nintendo’s Wii have taken the video game console lead.
Sony entered the digital camera market a few years back at the same time other electronics firms (Panasonic, HP) did, expecting that existing brand awareness would translate to sizable market share in digital cameras. The problem is, these entrants never made photographic equipment before, don’t have that expertise, and so their digital cameras are inferior to the ones made by the likes of Canon (and Nikon), and everyone knows it. Moreover, there is plenty of competition out there with other players like Casio, Olympus, Samsung, Kodak, Fuji…
Sony appears to be taking a page out of Canon’s book on digital camera pricing, but if the “Alpha” line isn’t of superior quality, customers won’t pay top dollar like they have (and continue to do) for Canon’s PowerShot and EOS lines.
A.J. Mody
January 10, 2009 at 9:07 pm |
What I want to know is, would this ban also keep the resale values of dSLR cameras and accessories artificially high? And if it would, will current owners of Sony cameras “short” their equipments and convert to Canon & Nikon which imho offer higher benefit/price ratio.