Strategic Audit of SONY Corporation Part 4: Conclusion

Analysis of Strategic Factors (SWOT)

Review of Mission and Objectives

Currently, Sony's mission is to actively create more innovative products that enhance the way consumers enjoy their multimedia entertainment through specialization, differentiation, and miniaturization. These tactics are incorporated into Sony's strategic factors, which will allow them to take initiative in aligning their missions and strategies. Sony strives to create different products that offer new forms of entertainment to intrigue those who are interested in electronic gaming and multimedia. Their constant search for new ways to enhance their interactive entertainment products have helped them to stay focused on the importance of consumer satisfaction. Sony's mission allows them to take advantage of their opportunities and strengths, while striving to avoid their threats and overcome their weaknesses. With product integration in mind, Sony will continue to ensure that their products are specialized to fit each market segment. Their challenges of being one of the top competitors in the digital entertainment market has helped them to change the way products are marketed and introduced to their target market. Miniaturization has helped the company by giving them a definite title of being one of the few manufacturers to create a compact product that delivers high definition and quality.

Sony's objective is to maintain the leading provider in the electronic industry through their corporate initiatives. Their resources are maximized and used at its full potential, which strengthens their operations. This helps them maintain their profile as a leader in the market. Sony exemplifies their key objectives in light of their strategic factors, because it allocates their various categories strategically. They remain focused on optimizing their high-tech digital imaging, audio, and video quality as well as keeping their product sizes to its minimum. This tactic has become very beneficial to the company in order to retain their consumers and gain new ones.

Sony's missions and objectives have been aligned to their strategic factors as they work hard to ensure that they are allocating all of their resources as well as actively searching for more ways to improve. The only change that needs to be taken on by the company is the need to strengthen their brand in the gaming industry. As they are trying to promote and market their game consoles, not many consumers are currently too thrilled on what their products have to offer; however, they have shown slight improvement over the years. What Sony can do is to initiate their high quality sound and video to market their brand. Sony can work on specializing their products and making sure that customers are aware of the differentiation between Sony and their top competitors. This will help the company

Implementation

Through the recent security breach, hackers of the Sony network were able to retrieve personal information such as name, address, birthdates, phone number along with your login name and password. The security breach on PlayStation Network left 77 million accounts exposed, putting many of the PlayStation users at risk. To minimize risk to their current and potential users Sony should focus their resources on creating better security systems. Sony's IT team should begin investigating on how their security systems could have been broken into so many times and what changes in their system can be done to prevent more security issues from happening. The company is now covering every possible loophole to prevent further information from being taken which means Sony's networks will continue to stay down as a precautionary measure. In the mean time Sony's PR should continue to let the public know of the current updates from the company. If this security issues continue to happen and are not handled now, it will hurt the company in the long run causing them to lose business to their biggest gaming competitor Microsoft.

This is not financially feasible at the moment for Sony because Sony has a asset to liability ratio of 80%. However, synergy is said to exist for a divisional corporation such as Sony, if the return on investment of each division is greater than what the return would be if each division were an independent business. Sony has a gaming console division, television division, camera division and etc. They all have their own research and development team, management, human resources, marketing, and etc. Sony can implement a program where each division is rewarded for aiding another division in innovative technology. For example, the gaming division and the television division can do collaborative work to help each other out. The gaming division can give feedback to the television division in how the gaming consumers want in their televisions so they can help the television division to increase sales. As a result, this will increase more free cash onto the company and the extra free cash can be used on my information tech's to help secure the PlayStation Network.

A pro forma budget can be developed and agreed on how much free money they have to use on the research & development on the gaming console division. Priorities and timetables can be used in the development of a stronger PlayStation network. There will be a new standard operating procedure to ensure the security of the network. The first phase of restored services for North America and Europe will include: sign-in for PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, including the resetting of passwords, restoration of online gameplay across PlayStation 3 and PSP, playback rental video content, if within rental period, of PlayStation Store Video Store on PS3, PSP and Media Go, Q Music Unlimited, for current subscribers, on PS3 and PC, access to third party services such as VidZone and MUBI, 'friends' category on PS3, including Friends List, Chat Functionality, Trophy Comparison, PlayStation Home and increased security measures.

Evaluation and Control

With 75 factories around the world, Sony separates their headquarters based on geographical location. By doing so it allows each division to focus on their own specific region and gives each department a chance to check up the other divisions. Due to the recent security breaches, the company has not put enough of their resources into their security department. The company is now taking careful measures in response to their networks being hacked. Currently the company is trying to add a new position in the company who will be in charge of providing accountability data protection for new and existing users.

Since the security issues, Sony has been given a bad reputation in which all Sony divisions are struggling to recover from. To fix the current issues that the company shut down services such as Playstation Network and Qriocity, before any more information could be taken. As a result, the company has implemented new security measure to protect the users information from further hacking.

Along with these new security protocols, the company has required all PSN users to change their account passwords before they can sign in. In addition the password can only be changed in the same PS3 in which the account was first activated. Though Sony is trying its hardest to restore their systems, many consumers were very impatient and even mad that now there was was no way of users purchasing new games which also hurt game developers in the process. It also left users unable to play games that they already own with friends. This puts Sony in a bad light, damaging their reputation with the consumer and company relationship. To ease this tension, Sony should put more efforts into the PR department and by doing so it allows Sony to let their consumers know how much of an inconvenience it has been for them and it gives a chance for the company to regain consumer confidence. To further please Sony consumers and to get back on their good side, the company has strategically implemented a "Welcome Back" promotion, giving any member who has signed up for services before April 20th, four new games: two for the Playstation 3 and two for the Playstation Portable. This conveys to the consumers that the company does have the consumer's best interest in mind which will allow Sony to capture their business for a long time.