Distinguished Marketer ; James Hong
SONY COMPUTER Entertainment's unique approach to popularise a hand-held gaming console to a wider audience was spearheaded by James Hong, senior manager of its marketing division. The campaign also won him a Distinguished Marketer Award.
Mr Hong has worked in the marketing division of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies since he graduated from university in 1992. He thinks a good marketer should possess creativity, enthusiasm, skills and guts.
'PlayStation faces very serious illegal copying and BT [BitTorrent] downloading threats. More than 80 per cent of our hardware customers don't purchase our software but illegally download. This is the main reason I have a very limited budget for marketing,' Mr Hong said.
Therefore, he applied what he described as a new marketing approach to multimedia hand-held entertainment console PSP.
Using in-house public relations, Mr Hong organised themed events, with the participation of celebrities, exhibitions and co-operated with shopping malls to publicise and distribute the world's first PSP movie.
