Toshiba Executive: I don’t get it. All these trendy music players use our hard drives, right? So we take the next logical step and manufacture our own. Sounds like a can’t-miss to me. Now, two years later, we’re dumping our overstock Gigabeat 40GB MP3 players on Woot while the other guys are sipping champagne with Larry Mullen, Jr. What happened?

Toshiba Marketing Guy: Short answer: we don’t know. Our metrics indicate solid brand penetration, strong CRM follow-through, and a robust heritage of integrity associated with the Toshiba identity. But the ROI figures reveal a profound disconnect somewhere in the schema chain.

Toshiba Executive: Damn right they do. I mean, this is a great product – forty gigs of hard drive space, but nice and compact the way the rubes like ‘em these days. That docking cradle is a thing of beauty, letting you rip CDs from your computer directly to the Gigabeat in minutes. You can use the big color LCD to view pictures, or even sync up slideshows to your playlists. It’s Plays for Sure-certified, so it’ll play DRM-protected files, and they’ll sound great thanks to 29 different EQ settings and SRS WOW processing. We could go on all day talking about the great features of this thing. It even looks pretty cool. So why are we drowning in unsold Gigabeats?

Toshiba Marketing Guy: Short answer: degenerating market literacy and unprecedented regimentation of key demographic segments produced a minor but detectable chill in positioning-repositioning flexibility.

Toshiba Executive: What are you talking about?

Toshiba Marketing Guy: Short answer: absent a compelling narrative for redeployment, household decision-makers maintain high levels of functional certitude toward aggrandizing top-down calls to action.

Toshiba Executive: I don’t know what any of that means. And you know, I’m starting to think you don’t even know what any of that means.

Toshiba Marketing Guy: Uhh, scalable co-branding? Destabilized convergence of action items? Synergy?

Toshiba Executive: You’re fired.

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