When Sony released their PSP a couple of years ago, not a lot of people knew exactly what it was used for. Sure, some people knew that videos can be played on it, while other mostly though it was for playing video games.
But SCEE CEO Jim Ryan acknowledged to Official PlayStation Magazine that the company might have approached their PSP marketing in the wrong way, and ended up confusing a lot of potential customers.
“I think with PSP we tried to position it as a rather broad multimedia device. We talked a lot in the early days of PSP about its video playback functionality, its use as a music device and a host of other multimedia functionality that it had,” he said.
“I think this time we’ve realised that perhaps ended up confusing consumers, and they weren’t quite sure what the device was really all about. So this time the Vita does all of that stuff that we talked about on PSP, and it does it a lot better.
As for their marketing strategy for the PS Vita, he added that their approach will be more focused. “We’ve been a lot more single minded and much more focused in our positioning of Vita. We’re saying that this is primarily a gaming device. It has been developed from the ground up as a gaming device. What it does best is play games.”
The PlayStation Vita will launch on 22 February 2012
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
