Sony's new concept store appears to totally skip in-store video

July 28, 2010 by Dave Haynes

Suppose you were one of the world’s great consumer electronics brands, with a reputation for premium displays, and you decided to change up the retail design for a concept store. You’d make good use of those displays to tell the brand story and communicate with shoppers, right?

Well, no. You’d print up some signs and mount them on the walls, of course.

Jason Goldberg, who writes the Retail Geek blog, was involved in the Microsoft retail launch (which I really, really like) and had a tweet up this morning (he’s @retailgeek) about a new Sony retail concept store in Nagoya, Japan. THIS will be cool, I thought.

Not so much. It borrows, yet again, on the Apple minimalist design with a tall, airy room and rows of tables somewhat crammed with various bits. Sony has a lot of SKUs and they all seem to be there.

Instead of using digital screens, and perhaps the Sony Ziris digital signage platform, product information is nothing but austere signs and what look like blown-up versions of brochures mounted behind acrylic.

I don’t believe in putting a display network in just because you can, but this kind of store and brand screams digital. Pretty disappointing, given this Sony.

Jason, by the way, appears to have left MTI, where he was VP Marketing for many years. Linked In profile here.

Leave a comment