Comments on: Sony holds secret sale on HDTVs

An unadvertised four-day sale on certain Sony HDTVs leaves lucky consumers delighted, others frustrated.

[nonicks]

..plz tell baker

that it's not like handing out money to the customers who walked into the store.

It was for following reasons
- surprising pleasantly to customers who already wanted to buy 1
- allure customers who want a HDTV but didn't allocate full price budget and still walked into a retail store
- set the expectation for next year that - Sony will have more such unexpected and favoured deals for holiday season

and last but not the least

- save the money on Marketing/Promotionbut yet rake in the extra moolah from unexpecting customers.


Check their sales number and you will figure out.. what I am talking about.

[jsamuels84]

Did Samsung do the same?

I bought a 50" Samsung DLP last weekend for $1299 with great financing (Circuit City). This weekend it's back up to $1799. Same for the 42" model DLP (was only $999).

[fletchb]

Walmart

Walmart is waking them up to the fact that they are way overpriced!

[TVToy]

Sony Lost Me

After decades of being a big Sony customer, my computer monitor
died and it was like pulling hen's teeth to get them to fix/replace it.
It was pure hell for months. After being treated like dirt, I'll never
buy another Sony prouct, no matter how low the price is.

[dzugashvili]

Me, too

I bought a Sony computer will Corel's WordPerfect pre-installed. After updating WP, there was a problem. I called Sony and someone in India said "Call Corel". Corel said "Call Sony". Then, my .NET file was corrupted. MS said "Call Sony". Sony said "Call MS". And this was my first day online. Sony in Japan doesn't use Indians or Chinese for their customer service. Why should we in the U.S. No more Sonys for me.

[GrandpaN1947]

They'll have to drop them a heck of

a lot more before I'll buy a Sony product again. I figure the Rootkit they illegally gave me cost me more than what they dropped the prices. My last Sony TV failed right after the warranty ran out. No sony products for me again, ever!

[GrandpaN1947]

Sony is desperate

They have screwed soooo many of their customers with rootkits, lawsuits, and bad warranties that the customers are looking elsewhere for their products. The "Sony" brand means something else to customers than what it used to. Instead of being worth extra money, it means rootkits, lawsuits, and faulty products.

[Deekman]

Good greif

"Grandpa" is the perfect name for your clueless on-line persona.

No one is getting a rootkit from an HDTV. The lawsuits related
to the rootkit issue are agains Sony MUSIC, not Sony electronics.

The Sony brand name still means exactly what it always has. The
best, most cutting edge technology for an attainable, albeit
higher than bargain-basement Chinese crap prices found
elsewhere.

Sony is far from "desperate" and the turnaround the company is
making is a historical effort that everyone is benefiting from.
The bottom line remains this: If you have the desire and the
means for the highest quality electronics; Sony is your choice.

[pjk0]

Red herring and a waste of editorial space

We have a strange culture here in the USA, where people place an extraordinary amount of their self-esteem at stake over whether or not they "got a better bargain than the other person" on something.

Any manufacturer or retailer has a right to set prices as they see fit. (within legal limits, and surely Sony is not offering product below cost here) If Sony's "regular" price on their HDTV's is competitive (as it would have to be or they would never be a major player in the market) then they are not in any way "gouging" anyone by offering an limited deal for a very limited time.

An amazing amount of consternation over nothing at all!

[jion]

Time Value of Money

Get the better deal, reinvest the rest.

[aleforce]

Marketing Experimentation?

has any of those hyper-smart analyst thought that sony may have run an experiment to test consumer response to pricing changes? the best way not to bias the sample of respondents in such an experiment is not to advertise the promotion.

although letting retailers self-select whether or not to run the price promotion introduces another bias into the experimental set-up, this approach should guarantee that sony gets a test group and a control group for the experiment. (and considering that sony would cause an outrage in the distribution channel if it were to give price cuts to some retailers and not others, this approach is probably the only feasible one.)

with such an experimental set-up, sony will have shopping data from one of the busiest shopping days of the year from retailers who ran the promo (the test group) and they will have data retailers who didn't (the control group). armed with such a data set, they could determine if an increase in expected volume- generated by a price drop-will offset losses in margin (from lowering price). if sony analyzes the data quickly, they will have a good idea which promotional approach, say, in the last two weeks before christmas (also very strong weeks in the season) is likely to produce the highest returns for sony.

without an experiment such as this one, a widely publicized price promotion in the last two weeks of the season, may become very costly to sony if they were to lower prices but couldn?t make up for the margin loss with increased volume . and that would most certainly displease wall street and the analysts much more...

so if my hypothetical example were to be the case, this story would be an example of very good marketing practice and control. unless the complaining analysts know that sony is in fact not running an experiment, there is absolutely no reason to complain. but who said that all analysts know what they are talking about? also, maybe sony isn?t running an experiment after all . but the time to evaluate the merits of their behavior isn?t now, it?s in january after the close of the christmas shopping season.

[patch_tuesday]

Even worse for the retailers?

I actually went out with the intention to purchase one of the
"limited availability" Panasonic plasma's on sale, which I didn't
manage to get on Black Friday. After failing at that, I came home
to do more TV research and the Sony rear projections kept
getting mentioned as being even better performers. That's when
I found out the 60" Sony were $900 off.

It got better though. Circuit City sold me the Sony 60" for
$2,399 on the Saturday after Black Friday (They were sold out in
most stores). I went ahead and took their credit card, which gave
me the purchase at 0% interest for 18 months, and then on top
of that they gave me 10% off on all accessories purchased with
the TV.

On Tuesday I visited Circuit City again to pick up a small item
and found the 60" Sony cut down to $1,999, which gave me a
110% price challenge return of $462. Circuit City explained that
Best Buy had cut the TV $200 and they wanted to top that, so
they cut it another $200 for a $400 total price cut.

I'm not sure if it was a screwup or part of Black Friday, but
Circuit City gave me a $599 TV stand for $340.

When I checked again in the next couple of days, the set was
$2,699...

[patch_tuesday]

BB and CC say the retail price is...

Best Buy and Circuit City's websites report the retail price on this
set as being $3,299.

[Dan S]

Makes Sense to Me

1) Some of the items contained obsolete/older technology. Sell it before the public becomes to tech savvy and it collects dust in inventory
2) Sony made a decision not to advertise, thus saving costly ad dollars.
3) Most important, the surprise deals" causes articles like this one as well as causes consumers to keep an eye on Sony products watching in anticipation for the next surprise discount.

I believe Sony is smarter than most give them credit for.

[Phil-IT]

Correct!

Dan, I definitely agree with you!

The first obvious point that came to my mind was your 3rd point: now people will have in mind that Sony once made a "secret sale" and is likely to do another someday.
And it provoked a lot of articles like this one on CNet.

[heystoopid]

Oh well

Oh well, who cares anyway, anything with the brand name of SONY, for me I wouldn't be surprised if the units sold cheaply in this mystery sale were repaired factory quality control rejects!

For after all, SONY did give us the infamous rootkit, which infected more computers world wide than many live computer virii,a dodgy batch of cybershot camera's with dew point problems ,a batch of very dodgy LCD tv's preprogrammed to require expensive service calls to fix! and undoubtedly much more!

Yes who indeed will buy SONY in this day and age?

[jen953982]

I don't buy Sony products under any circumstances

I've had bad experiences with product quality, and I've had extremely negative experiences getting warranty service. Add to that the fact that this company would stoop so low as to install the rootkit virus on customer's computers and they've lost me for good. I won't even rent a movie from Sony Pictures.

[meh130]

Very Clever

Let the other vendors pay the $$ to advertise to drive traffic into the stores, and then undercut them on prices.

Worked for me. I got a new 50" SXRD KDS-50A2000 at Best Buy for $1,899. But I had been planning to buy that set for some time.

[Iboughtbeta]

Sale not Value

I saw the sale. I bought a LG for less. Sony needs to go for half off to be a value.

[Below Meigh]

SONY=POOP

I've had a 36" XBR replaced three times only to have third act up and out of warranty (compared to other manufacturers, Sony is not surprisingly arrogant there too at 1 yr parts 90 days labor on a TV that retailed for $1999). Sony lost me (as customer).
This kind of strategy will only backfire on the bottom line. Dealers want traffic and sales, not flash-sales gimmicks. Well, off to buy a Samsung HDTV... bye bye Sony.

[Ryo Hazuki]

Sony = quality

I actually have a Samsung HDTV, but I also have a Sony Hi-Fi, a Sony Trinitron TV, a Sony VCR, Sony headphones, Sony Walkman and Sony Mini-Disc Walkman.
From all, the VCR is the only device which is ruined, after more than 10 years without ever having had its heads cleaned. All the rest is working perfectly and I'm very satisfied with their quality, would buy them again if it was today.
Just because Below Meigh has a problem with its Sony 36" XBR doesn't necessarily mean all their products suck, does it?

[Ryo Hazuki]

Sony

I bet confidently if it was Apple doing this people would be overwhelmed.
No matter what Sony does, people just criticise. They could even give away their products for free, people would say that's bad.
It's just an unusual promotion, people.

[ReVeLaTeD]

The reason they did it is perfectly logical.

Loyalty Test Marketing. That's not it's official name, but that's the concept - test how loyal consumers are, and how many people check you out based on your branding. Advertising would bring people for the wrong reasons. Sure it increases dollars, but that doesn't matter if the amount returned equals or even exceeds the amount sold. Aside from that they may not have cared about making any money, given the sheer amount of discount per set.

I seriously think they were trying to test consumer loyalty and brand strength by seeing, of those consumers who regularly browse Sony's site, who would notice that some stuff had dropped price, thus telling friends, thus making more sales, etc.

Part of the problem has always been places like Costco and Walmart that sell substandard TVs at critically low prices in an attempt to spur demand. While that's great and all for the frugal consumer, brand names do matter. Sony's known for their products breaking down and being generally poor, beginning with the original PlayStation and extending to their other home entertainment products. Trying to improve that image is a good bet.

I know I personally have stopped supporting Sony completely. Some of the up and coming brands like Polaroid (I know they've been around for years, but I mean for their other non-camera products that they're recently releasing) and LG (same thing, but for their non-phone technology) are making great strides. I just can't deal with Sony and their poor quality products anymore.