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It is the original "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors Wife. Nor shalt thou covet his ass...etc." We call it "keeping up with the Jones'" and Sony is trying to call it Qualia.
I, myself, find that I tend to gravitate towards service oriented products and stores. This is mostly because I try to carve my stores niche into a 'quality service' experience like Sony is trying to do with this line. You can buy most things that I sell at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, etc. but we count on customers coming back in because we know them better. We call them by name, we try and learn their likes and dislikes and recommend items from a position of knowing them.
This is new to the electronics industry but not a new concept in psychology. This seems to me to be a way to distance the constant "upgrade" mentality into a more permanent buying experience. Sounds like a small market but I'll bet that there will be quite a few 2nd mortgages activated over these products.
I loved this line, "For a multinational marketing powerhouse like Sony, designing that experience — and figuring out whom it might appeal to — is practically a science."
They could have left out the 'practically'.
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