Sony Mobile’s Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Walker, will resign next month

Steve Walker, the guy who is currently in charge of Sony Mobile’s marketing, will resign at the end of next month. This man has been working at Sony for 17 years, so this news shouldn’t be taken lightly. He’s going to be replaced by Jacob Sten, who we know very little about. Our crack research department will soon fix that.

Why is Walker important? He was responsible for transitioning the Sony Ericsson brand to Sony Mobile. He’s also the guy behind the “Made of Imagination” effort. His last big hurrah will be the international launch of the Sony Xperia Z, which should be hitting store shelves next month. For those of you who don’t remember the Z, it was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It has a 5 inch 1080p screen, quad core processor, 2 GB of ram, and a 13 megapixel camera. The Z is essentially Sony’s response to HTC’s M7/One and the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Can this new guy, Jacob, turn Sony around? Depending on how you do your math, Sony is already back on track. They’ve overtaken Nokia, RIM, and HTC. Their next target should be the Chinese players, Huawei and ZTE. We know Sony has a ton of design talent, they also make several of their own components, and let’s not forget about Sony’s vast collection of music and movies. All the ingredients needed to become a huge player are there.

What should Sony do now? Work more tightly with Google. Imagine what a Sony Nexus would look like? They should also parter with the larger operators and commit to spending an insane amount of money on marketing. Apple spends roughly $1 billion a year on advertising. Samsung does 10x that. Sony should be somewhere in the middle. People already love the Sony brand, they just need to know about their new phones.

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