“Long Live Play”

When I think about marketing, I think about advertising campaigns. In our first lecture, we were told that marketing is not just about that. However, it is one big part and so I decided to write about an interesting campaign for this first post. I tried to think about a certain commercial I had watched recently and found appealing, interesting and innovative. After some time thinking, I remembered Sony’s PlayStation newest campaign: “Long Live Play”.

Following the extremely successful “It Only Does Everything” campaign (2009-2011), PlayStation has managed to live up to the expectations with this new engaging and innovative campaign. “Long Live Play” is about the gaming experience and how PlayStation can bring several entertainment options to different types of audiences.

A few months before, PlayStation asked their loyal gamers to send pictures of themselves with their consoles and a brief description of what the PS3 meant for them. The response was amazing; thousands of gamers sent their responses. PlayStation selected about a dozen of those die-hard gamers to represent the gamer community and the resulting ad was fantastic and critically acclaimed. The key to its success was engaging the customers and letting them be part of the campaign. This way, the customer felt valued and could appreciate the company more. This, along with bringing the price of their most basic console down to $249  has been essential.

The previous “It Only Does Everything” campaign helped to increase PS3 sales by 184% in the first three months and overall make the PS3 a household name in 50 million houses worldwide. This new campaign definitely seems to be in the same path. Sony managed to innovate by engaging their customers in a unique way to further strengthen the relationship with their existing customers and create new ones with potential ones.