This month several vendor, including Samsung, LG, Panasonic and Sony will roll out new TV models prior to the Olympic Games in Beijing in an effort to lift sales. The new generation TV's are thinner and more stylised with vendors set to back the new models with massive TV and billboard advertising campaigns.
In a farcical move LG under their new Marketing Director David Brand, have even gone as far as asking media organisations to sign a confidentiality agreement for a TV that is already on sale with retailers. Set to be officially launched in mid May the TV is also being advertised in Harvey Norman catalogues and has been on sale in Korea since February and in the US from this week.
This TV which is part of a 100M global dollar marketing campaign is already being discounted with Harvey Norman offering a $120 trade in discount.
For many vendors the biggest issue is profitability and pricing. Earlier this week a leading research Company DisplayBank, said that Sony was set to start a massive LCD TV discount war. They also said that the Sony display division that invented the Bravia TV brand was unprofitable and that the only way for Sony to survive was to slash prices.
