Sony Is Selling Its Waterproof MP3 Player INSIDE a Bottle of Water
Here’s an ingenious marketing scheme: packaging a waterproof MP3 player fully submerged in a bottle of water.
You, as a customer, may or may not have known that the Sony W Series Walkman MP3 player is waterproof. So, to make sure this product’s most salient feature was on display, a marketing agency in New Zealand came up with “The Bottled Walkman.”
DraftFCB, the company behind “The Bottled Walkman,” decided to actually package the MP3 player in a clear bottle of water. The MP3 player (plus bottled water) is now on sale in vending machines at gyms and swimming pools in New Zealand.
“It’s quite a niche product targeted particularly at swimmers, so we thought, let’s do something so we can get right in front of the target audience,” DraftFCB executive creative director Tony Clewett told StopPress.
Other than its ability to function while wet or underwater, the W Series isn’t too groundbreaking as an MP3 player. Though it is small, lightweight and doesn’t have bothersome cables, it holds only 4 GB of music and doesn’t offer any great way to scan through songs.
With its simple set of features and $99 price tag, Sony probably won’t be grabbing any customers for the W Series who aren’t excited by its waterproof abilities. Submerging the marketing campaign under water makes sense, then.
According to StopPress, Sony will assess sales of “The Bottled Walkman” in New Zealand before deciding whether to push the program to other countries.
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