(established 1946)
The Sony trademark is globally recognized as a symbol of high standards of design and a diverse and often innovative range of audio-visual products personified by the ubiquitous Walkman launched in 1979. The company was founded in 1946 by Masaru Ibuka, an electronics engineer, and Akio Morita, a physicist, under the title of Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, soon establishing a reputation for the production of electrical components. Its first product of note was the first commercial Japanese G Type tape recorder of 1950, although it was limited to the recording of speech. This innovative outlook was maintained through the manufacture under licence of the first Japanese transistor in 1954 and the marketing of its first transistor radio in 1955. The small, clean-lined, and simple design of this TR-55 radio was the company's first export, encouraging the development of pocket-sized models in succeeding years such as the highly popular TR-610 of 1958. The TR-55 was the first company product to use the Sony logo, a corporate branding feature that was further developed by Yasuko Kuroki and further revised in 1973. By the late 1950s Japanese product design was seen in a far more positive light than it had been before the war when it had been felt by many to be overly dependent on Western precedents. In 1959 the advertising slogan ‘Sony—A Worldwide Brand Born in Japan’ carried some real conviction. Miniaturization was an important facet of many contemporary Japanese products and was also visible in the lightweight Sony 8-301 portable television of 1959, its clean rounded, attractive appearance earning a Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale of 1960. This interest in miniaturization continued with the launch of the globally successful Walkman in 1979, the Watchman miniature television in 1982, and the Discman, a small CD player, in 1985. In the decades following the Second World War Sony, like a number of other progressive Japanese companies in the same period, appointed its first full-time designer (1954), establishing its design department under Norio Ohga in 1961 with seventeen members of staff. The company's exponential commitment to design may be evidenced in its employment of about 120 designers in the Sony Design Centre in the mid-1980s. Research and development was another important ingredient in Sony's success, supported by slogans such as ‘Research Makes the Difference’ initiated in the late 1950s. Other noted Sony products have included the Profeel (meaning ‘professional feel’) television in 1981, the Compact Disc player (a joint venture with CBS, Philips, and Deutsche Grammaphon) in 1982, and the palmtop computer of 1990. Other ventures included the purchase of CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Picture Entertainment in the following year. Sony has managed to stay at the forefront in design terms through such initiatives as its formation of a Strategic Design Group able to propose a range of possible design futures directly to the company's president. Such visibility of design issues at executive boardroom level is an important ingredient of success in the market place.
