« B2B Relationship Tool: Hollywood Loves IM | Main | Newsletter Content: Profile a Customer Creation »
Customer Intuition: ESPN Considers Branded TVs
The NYT reports that sports network ESPN is considering extending it's television brand into TV hardware.
"Brand value will become more important than ever, as consumers are now fragmented to such a great degree that brands must build a new relationship with them," he [Disney President Robert A. Iger] said. "Content will remain king, while technology will become its powerful prime minister."The decision to do a brand extension is based on customer intuition. The central question being "Do you think customers of product X would be interested in product Y?" This assumes an informed intuition regarding one's customers.The network is also considering the possibility of offering special content to owners of its TV's. As digital televisions begin to enter the market with standard Ethernet connections and built-in hard drive recorders (called personal video recorders, or P.V.R.'s), there will be more opportunities for content providers to offer programming to a captive audience.
"An ESPN-branded TV could arrive tuned to ESPN," Mr. Doherty said. "It would be dumb to send out a TV with a built-in P.V.R. if the P.V.R. was empty."
I think the failure of brand extensions is not usually the design or quality of the product itself it's the failure of customer intuition. Companies make leaps of logic hoping to lead their customers into new products and services and the fail miserably. They need to be one or two steps in front of their customers instead of five or ten steps.
In the case of ESPN the last line of the quote is intriguing. Perhaps instead of rebadged middle of the line TVs ESPN should focus on custom content packages for PVRs. That would be a better first step because the sports obsessed fans that ESPN wants to market TVs to already have the best TVs they can afford. They may or may not have a PVR(Tivo). Either way they can still download ESPN content into a PVR.
If ESPN wants to reach further into the lives of their customers they should develop deep intuition about the other interests and passions of their customers.
How are you developing deep customer intuition in your organization? Are you considering a line extension that makes a leap of logic like ESPN's content to hardware? Are you one step in front of your customers or ten steps?
Related:
Building Customer Intuition Category Archive
Customer Intuition Tools Category Archive
tags: ESPN | brand extension | TV | PVR
What's a tag?
June 15, 2005 in Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, Current Affairs, Sports, Television, Web/Tech | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c459653ef00d83423f07453ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Customer Intuition: ESPN Considers Branded TVs:
» Customer Intuition: ESPN Considers Branded TVs from PVRLib
[Source: BeConnected] quoted: The network is also considering the possibility of offering special content to owners of its TV's. As digital televisions begin to enter the market with standard Ethernet connections and built-in hard drive recorders (call... [Read More]
Tracked on Jun 16, 2005 9:15:53 AM