Thanks to future man Kevin Butler and his spoof adverts, Sony has reconnected with its ”sense of humor” that we ”came to know and love”.
The ‘It Only Does Everything’ campaign for the PlayStation 3 is working for Sony, reveals Peter Dille. They feature the fictitious Kevin Butler who speaks from the future to tell us what the console can actually do with a pinch of humour.
”The campaign is working to drive hardware sales,” he said. ”PlayStation 3 sales are up 184 percent in the three months following the price drop, and while a lot of that has to do with price itself, we know from research that consumers are more educated as well.”
”Purchase intent went from 19 percent prior to the price drop, to 36 percent after this campaign started. And we’ve also tracked our competitors and they’ve fallen during the same time.” So successful are the Kevin Butler ads that they plan a lot more.
”You’re going to continue to see Kevin Butler highlighting new content that is hitting the platform. That will include PlayStation Move later this year and also 3D,” said Dille.
So why did Sony air an advert with a baby doll crying in a white room with a PlayStation 3? It was all to do with power and getting us to go search for answers…
”We get questions about the white room and the baby ad quite a bit. That whole campaign was to get people to say ‘What the… ? I need to understand more about what this is,’” explained the Sony bigwig. Instead it just creeped most people out.
”That whole campaign was really about power and the power the PS3 has. But what we found was that this whole positioning was a bit intimidating to people. Our research also showed that Sony could be perceived as arrogant.” It’s not some bottle of perfume that needs abstract junk on the screen to get our attention, it’s a friggin games console.
”With our campaign now, we kind of knocked off all those obstacles. The arrogance I think has gone away,” Dille said, reports IGN. ”We kind of gotten back to our mojo with the sense of humor that people came to know and love with early PlayStation advertising. I think it’s just a more likable connection to the consumer.”
Has Sony lost some of its arrogance? They do seem more humble now that they know we don’t just buy things because there’s a PlayStation logo slapped on it. Check out the creepy baby and white room PS3 advert below - what were marketing thinking?
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