MTV Gets Behind Music; Sony's Vaio Also Rises

Brandweek, Dec 11, 2000 by Todd Wasserman

Like sister channel VH-1, MTV is going, one might say behind the music with a line of consumer electronics including beach radios, headphones and necksets in Gen Y-friendly lime green, orange and cobalt blue designs.

Set to hit shelves at Circuit City Best Buy Musicland, J.C. Penney and Fred Meyer by mid-2001 at prices ranging from $19.99 to $69.99 the line comes from little-known branding firm Refac.

As MTV vp-program enterprises Lisa Silfen recalls, the music channel was casting about for a CE line for a while when it came upon Refac at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January. Refac was showing a line of CE products based on Volkswagen's Beetle. "It was like nothing we'd ever seen before," said Silfen. "They're not the biggest, but we felt the creative direction was right for MTV."

After signing an exclusive licensing pact in June, Refac set out to capture the MW brand essence. "One of the things we picked up on was there was this underlying irreverence," said Bert Heinzelman, who heads up Ref ac's design unit. That irreverence is reflected, he said, in a clock radio whose time display is on the side, rather than in front and a horn-shaped beach radio that leaves an MW imprint in the sand.

MTV, which developed a line of backpacks and school gear earlier this year, hasn't decided how it will promote the 9-SKU line. "We expect giveaways, prizes, presence on their own Web site," said Robert Tuchman, president and CEO of Refac. Silfen wasn't so sure. "When it makes sense, we showcase our products," she said. "We don't want to turn the channel into a big shill." Still, because the line has been well-received internally Silfen expects it will get some exposure on the channel.

Sony's Vaio may be the Ralph Nader of desktop PCs, idling at a 3% share, but its notebooks are making serious inroads. ARS, the La Jolla, Calif., market researcher said Sony's notebooks got 29.1% of retail shelf space in October a new high versus a 22.5% share last October. That puts Sony at No.1 in shelf space, handily beating No.2 Compaq at 25.8%.

Sony and Hewlett-Packard's gains really come at the expense of Toshiba, which has fallen hard this year, down to 13.4% of shelf space in October, compared to 26% in May. Toshiba is now focusing on profits, rather than market share, per a rep. It also lost Chris Pollitt, dir-portable product marketing, to Sony in October. Carl Pinto, group manager of portable product marketing, replaced Pollitt at Toshiba.

HP, meanwhile, is plotting to take Sony on in the high-end, low-weight category with a rebrand of its corporate OmniBook 500, ranging from $ 19003,400 under the Pavilion name. The OmniBook 500 weighs 3.4 lbs. versus the 6.5 lbs. for its current Pavilion notebooks, and has a slim, streamlined "business cool" look, per Bob Nitzberg, retail category mgr for HP'S mobile computing division.