Sony "make.believe": The Campaign That Tried to Make One Company Out of a Hundred Different Sonys

By the late 2000s, Sony had a strange problem for a company its size. Ask someone what Sony stood for, and you'd get a dozen different answers depending on which part of the business they'd bought from. PlayStation felt like one brand. Bravia televisions felt like another. Walkman, VAIO laptops, Sony Pictures, Sony Music, each division had built its own voice over the years, and none of them were speaking to each other. In September 2009, Sony decided it was time to fix that.

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A Company Talking in Too Many Voices

For years, Sony had run its electronics and entertainment businesses under separate marketing strategies entirely. Its consumer electronics line had been promoted since 2004 under the tagline "like.no.other," a campaign that produced some genuinely famous ads. But "like.no.other" was built for gadgets. It said nothing about Sony's music, films, or games, and it said nothing about what tied the whole company together in the first place.

Internally, things were also messier than they looked from the outside. Sony's divisions operated in silos, bureaucracy slowed decisions down, and the company had been slow to adapt to a rapidly digitising market. Competitors like Samsung and Apple were moving faster and telling clearer stories to consumers. Sony's chairman and CEO at the time, Sir Howard Stringer, saw the fragmentation as more than a marketing problem, it was a symptom of a company that had grown so large it had forgotten how to sound like one company.

Announcing "make.believe" at IFA Berlin

On September 2, 2009, at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Sony unveiled its answer: a new brand message called "make.believe." This wasn't just a new slogan bolted onto old ads. It was the first time in Sony's history that a single message was meant to represent everything the company made, electronics, entertainment, and network services, under one idea.

Stringer framed it as an attempt to reignite the innovative spirit inside Sony itself, not just to impress customers outside it. The phrase, with its deliberate dot sitting between "make" and "believe," was designed to represent the bridge between imagination and engineering, the idea that Sony's role was to turn what people could dream up into something they could actually hold, watch, or play.

Bringing the Idea to Life, One Market at a Time

Turning a brand philosophy into an actual advertisement took a few more months. The first "make.believe" commercial, titled "A Boy's Magical Journey," aired in November 2009. Produced by the agency 180, the 90-second film followed a boy moving through a series of imaginative worlds built from Sony's own products and technologies. From there, the message expanded outward, into print, digital, and outdoor advertising across Europe.

The United Kingdom got its own local execution just weeks later. On December 3, 2009, Sony Centres launched a "make.believe" television spot created by agency TBWA, timed for the Christmas shopping season. It showed a young boy sitting in an empty room that bursts into colour, toys, and Sony products the moment he presses a button marked with the make.believe logo, built around VAIO laptops, Walkmans, and e-readers, the gifts people were actually buying that December.

The United States joined the campaign in January 2010, and Sony backed the push hard, committing a reported $100 million budget for "make.believe" activity that year alone.

From Storytelling to Selling 3D

Later in 2010, the campaign took on a very specific, practical job: convincing people that 3D television was worth buying. Sony rolled out a second wave of "make.believe" advertising built around its 3D product line, featuring American football star Peyton Manning and pop singer Justin Timberlake. The goal wasn't just brand warmth this time, it was education. Many consumers were confused or skeptical about how 3D actually worked, so alongside the ads, Sony organised thousands of in-store demonstrations, letting people see the technology for themselves rather than just hear about it.

A Slogan That Slowly Faded

"make.believe" stayed part of Sony's identity well into the early 2010s, showing up at major moments like the 3D showcases at CES 2011. But by the mid-2010s, as Sony's priorities shifted again, the phrase gradually faded from the company's marketing, replaced by newer messaging as consumer engagement strategies evolved.

Five Lessons From Sony's "make.believe"

1. A big company needs one story, not several good ones. Sony's separate strategies for electronics and entertainment might each have made sense on their own, but together they left the company without a single identity. Unifying the message was as much an internal fix as an external one.

2. Leadership has to own the reason for a rebrand. Stringer didn't present "make.believe" as a cosmetic refresh. He tied it directly to reigniting the company's culture, giving the campaign a purpose beyond simply looking new.

3. A global idea still needs local translation. The same "make.believe" philosophy showed up differently in Berlin, London, and the US, adapted to local products, seasons, and shopping moments, rather than run as one identical ad everywhere.

4. Emotional storytelling and functional education can share one platform. The campaign stretched all the way from a boy's imaginative journey to teaching people how 3D TVs worked, proving one brand idea can flex between inspiration and information.

5. Even strong slogans have a shelf life. "make.believe" ran for the better part of a decade, but eventually gave way to new messaging as the market and the company changed. No brand line, however well built, is designed to last forever.

Sony's "make.believe" campaign is a reminder that sometimes the hardest thing a global brand has to do isn't inventing a new product story, it's convincing every part of its own business to tell the same one.