This weekend we experienced Sony's Kando Everywhere, which due to the pandemic, had to be virtual rather than physical (Kando 4.0 was originally planned for Sun Valley, Idaho this weekend).
Using the new hopin.to platform, this virtual Kando conference featured three stages with simultaneous presentations, 20 instructors, live questions with Sony support, live networking, a video booth, portfolio reviews, and a small expo area with various vendors doing presentations and answering questions. Plus, of course, there were the giveaways (three A7S Mark III's were given away, plus a lot of other Sony gear as well). So if you saw a lot of #sonyalpha, #sonykandoeverywhere, and #sweepstakes tags on social media this past weekend, you know where they were coming from. While Kando Everywhere was clunkier than the real physical event—and as all online events these days had a few glitches here and there—I still found it a useful and inspiring event.
The customer engagement Sony gets from these events is amazing, as I've written before. There's very much a feel of "we're all in this together" at Kando, meaning that product makers, product instructors, and product users all interact and realize that they truly need each other.
The reason why I note all this is that Nikon wonders why customers aren't buying Z cameras at the levels they originally expected. I'm not at all sure how they figured out what to expect, because Nikon doesn't engage customers the way Sony just did (and has been doing for awhile). Instead, Nikon just continues their paternalistic, somewhat arrogant ways ("Here's our latest, you should buy it."). It's even unclear to me if Nikon (subsidiaries, corporate, engineering, whatever) actually gets any joy from the things we customers do with their equipment. They certainly aren't doing events like Kando (and let me be clear, they should).
We also don't get to see any joy that Nikon has for their equipment, either, because as customers we're never allowed to really interact with Nikon employees other than a few caretakers in support and repair. Okay, NPS can sometimes be an exception to that, but the NPS reps are getting more difficult to interact with as their numbers decrease and their budget withers.
By the end of this year Nikon will have at least four cameras (some renewed), sixteen lenses, and a couple of accessories they want to sell in the Z realm. And they want to sell those against two juggernauts: (1) Canon with their long-held near 50% ILC market share, and (2) Sony, who is using 21st century customer engagement tactics and (sometimes over)-hyped technology messaging to lay claim to being the more vocal, nimble competitor.
Nikon? Launch by press release. Delays in delivery and accessories not available. No cohesive social media engagement. No help from third-parties due to the company's proprietary nature. Inconsistent messaging (sometimes no messaging). Basically, Nikon has become the introvert in the market.
Nikon's putting a lot of faith on their legacy users continuing to stick around. The good news is that Nikon's engineering is quite good, so the products themselves still have plenty of appeal. If only you could learn more about them, get more access to them and to those that designed them, and could actually receive the products and bundles you wanted or ordered.
I've written it before, and I still believe it: Nikon's contraction isn't solely due to the market going away, or because of the quality of their products. It's because of how they treat their product lines publicly and in particular, how they don't interact with customers, existing or potential. The bean counters in Tokyo see anything that doesn't go in a box to be sold as a cost to be eradicated, so slowly all the things that help actually sell those boxes is disappearing. Which means the boxes don't sell as well as they should.
Nikon needs a customer engagement program. Their competitors have one. The competitor that they're most in danger of losing more market share to has a really good one, and it's figuring out how to do that virtually as well as physically (both the A7S Mark III launch and Kando Everywhere show that Sony's been trying to figure this out, and getting better at it very quickly).
This is not a criticism of Z cameras or lenses. I find those to be well made, well thought out, and well engineered. It's a criticism of whether Nikon is doing enough to promote and support those products, particularly here in the US and in Europe, which Nikon needs in order to generate the volume they want. Back just after the DSLR peak in 2011, Nikon started shifting. Rather than deal with trying to fix the things that were driving US/European loss of market share, Nikon instead simply pursued entering other markets for volume, such as India, or worse still, competing with GoPro. Today Nikon's seeing that impact of "looking elsewhere." When you have an issue, you need to address it directly, and I'd say that NikonUSA has had some real issues for some time now that are only getting worse.
We need a Z Can Do event. An event that engages those that bravely transitioned to the Z system early, and uses those folk to spread the message of what the Z system is all about and why it is desirable. If I weren't a one-man band, I'd simply step in and try to organize one myself, much like IDG did with Macworld Expo soon after the Apple Macintosh appeared (disclosure: I was lead columnist for Macworld at the time, and had worked at IDG previously).
Nikon's got another set of Z announcements coming soon. Canon and Sony raised the bar with their R5/R6 and A7S Mark III announcements, and both are trying to engage their customers more through other efforts. It's Nikon turn to join the party.
