Once again, Sony is missing the point. Its COO, Phil Molyneux, has come up with a zany scheme to give Sony’s new spherical Bluetooth portable speakers a name – by holding a contest.

That’s backward. The correct approach is to conduct research with the target audience and learn what moves them.

Based on those results, the company should then develop the most strategic name possible to attract that audience’s attention.

It’s a mistake to find an individual among the audience who comes up with a name that simply sounds cool.

Brand strategy is vital. Without it, brand becomes meaningless.

Question for Mr. Molyneux: Would you hold a contest to find out how much money you should allocate to research and development?

A name is one of the first brand identifications a customer makes with a product. An understanding of what is important to the market must drive the naming process, not catchy suggestions from random individuals.

Let me repeat: You should never base any strategic decision on qualitative research because it’s not projectable to the larger audience. And holding a contest is qualitative on a ridiculous level.

Instead, Sony must ask itself a variety of questions. How are these speakers different from the competition? Who is the person that would buy these instead of the Bose, Logitech and Beats options? How will they use them? Where will they use them?

The list of questions is long. But without asking them, Sony will not be able to stake out a position that sets itself apart from the others.

It all begins with a name that has meaning.

What Sony is doing is confusing public feedback with a strategic and sound investigation into a target audience’s mind. Making that stupid mistake is a brand catastrophe.

Sony is in trouble. New CEO Kaz Harai is trying to turn the company around with the debut of the PlayStation 4. The new console simply must reinvigorate the tired Sony brand.

Put simply, the Sony name doesn’t resonate as it once did. The company still makes great products but they are not preferred or coveted by customers. In fact, all of Sony’s products – tablets, televisions, computers, cameras and game systems – have competitors with equal or better technology and more meaningful brands.

Sony’s brand is now focused exclusively on technology. That isn’t enough.

With the release of PlayStation 4, the chatter is on computing power, new game engines and the number of polygons. But when Microsoft announces its next console, the tech will be comparable and the graphics will be just as pretty.

So where is Sony’s brand in all of this?

It’s time for Sony to put massive efforts into defining what its name represents beyond technology.

PlayStation 4 is important to Sony’s future. Yet even if it succeeds it will not fix the core problem with the Sony brand.

Over the past month, two pieces of news have caught my attention. The first was Sony’s purchase of Gaikai, a cloud-based video game site that allows big-named game titles to be played through an Internet browser. The second was that Ouya, an inexpensive game console that runs the Android operating system and Android-based games, is teaming up with OnLive to allow cloud gaming of some AAA content.

These moves have exciting and curious implications for the market. It’s exciting to see the industry rumbling towards digital, which will lead to the instant ability to play and be simple to use.

But how will the existing brands transition?

It will be interesting to see what, if any, integration Sony has planned between Gaikai and its next Playstation. Sony puts a lot of weight behind its high-priced hardware, using it to push new technologies. But streaming services, like Gaikai, don’t require much in the way of hardware. The Ouya is set to sell for $109 and that includes the processor chips, storage, etc.,needed to run Android-based games that would be downloaded to the unit. That $109 ticket price is quite a bit less then the $599 pricetag Sony slapped on the original 60GB PS3 in 2006.

Because of Ouya’s marriage with OnLive, Sony will have to think very strategically about how it utilizes Gaikai. If the company is too soft in its approach, Ouya has an opportunity to take market share. Sony needs to be aggressive, which means stepping out of its comfort zone and leaning more towards software than hardware.

There is a happy medium. Sony can achieve profits for its system and still retain preference for its brand, but if OnLive is successful at acquiring larger amounts of AAA content, Ouya’s existence will eat away at Sony’s margins.

Sony’s best bet is to champion the digital change rather than react to it.

OnLive is no longer new to the world of gaming. Yet, almost three years after its release, I am still not sure the brand will be a success unless the company quickly re-evaluates its focus.

Both my interest in OnLive as well as my frustration with the brand is rooted in a desire to see it succeed. I have talked many times about the natural progression toward digital formats and OnLive alone is carrying the flag for this transition within the console gaming market.

My frustration with the value of OnLive’s brand is that the value has been placed too heavily on technology. The technology is impressive, but when it comes to content, OnLive is lacking.

Sony had a similar problem when it pioneered e-book readers that used the e-ink technology that is still used in some circles today. Sony may have been first but today Amazon’s Kindle easily eats Sony’s lunch in e-reader sales. In the world of e-books – and video games – content is king.

Amazon understood that. Sony didn’t.

I first tried OnLive to see if the technology worked. Did it ever. That was all I needed to be sold on the idea of a purely digital transition for the market.

But then I looked beyond OnLive’s technology to the content and was disappointed.

In the video game market, brand and content are the two biggest points of differentiation. PlayStation 2 was a huge success because it commanded both. PlayStation 3 had a rocky run because it commanded neither. OnLive is new to the market and still trying to develop a brand. That won’t be easy with its content so weak.

This is not to say that OnLive is not making some smart moves. There is a push that could increase OnLive’s visibility, with rumors that Sony is looking to partner with a digital game service like OnLive that would run on Sony’s PS Vita and news that OnLive is teaming with Vizio on a new set-top box. Yet, due to its limited content library, it might be putting the cart before the horse.

Technology cannot drive preference all by itself. Technology must be driven by purpose. Content provides that purpose. As it stands, OnLive has no exclusive IPO, no big deals in the works with developers, no massive additions of current generation content to its digital library, and above all else, no brand message that defines who the OnLive customers are and why they should prefer OnLive.

It’s not too late. OnLive has the ability to turn this industry on its head. From how the market views content ownership and distribution of that content to how it can increase profits to developers, OnLive could change everything.

If OnLive fails, there will be at least one more console cycle stuck with the status quo. With or without OnLive, I believe the market will eventually make this shift. It just might take longer.

In the category of consumer electronics, there remains the seemingly constant push to stay one bell and one whistle ahead of the competition. Whether it is a new laptop with more memory, a new TV with an enhanced refresh rate or a bluetooth headset that can all but vanish entirely into the ear canal, it is a market that concentrates much too often on technical specifications of the product and not on the emotional precepts of the consumer. It is this disconnect between a brand and simple table stakes that has led to the decline of the once goliath Sony.

It is with Sony in mind that I turn the focus to what could very well be the nail in the coffin for the upcoming (yes, upcoming) Playstation Phone. The phone is a collaboration between the Sony Ericsson line and a Sony PSPgo handheld gaming device.

Since 2008, Sony Ericsson has seen its market share decrease from 7.6%-3.1% and the Playstation PSP has seen unit sales decrease from 13.8-9.9 million in an otherwise expanding market. This begs the question, “How can two products, both with ineffective branding and declining sales, hope to combine forces to yield different results?”

Sony’s brand of “Make.Believe,” which is used across all of its product offerings (phones, televisions, cameras, etc.), speaks to Sony as a company not to who the consumer is. The aspect of imagination being the only limit to what can be created is a nice mantra for Sony engineers but it does little to identify with the consumer.  Why would a consumer who believed that the products they purchased were the most imaginative settle for the imaginations of others?

Even worse it that Sony is not even following through its faulty brand. The key element of the Playstation phone versus any other phone is the integration of the PSP gaming system within the hardware. But is anyone still wondering what gaming will be like on a cell phone? The new phone will also include a new marketplace to purchase games. But is anyone still looking for a convenient store that can be accessed via their phone where they can download apps now that we all have been living with iTunes?

The whole is equal to the sum of its parts and, in the case of the playstation phone, the parts are poor branding and declining sales. I am not a mathematician, but I have only known two negatives to yield a positive in golf. Without a very close look at their brand, Sony’s Playstation Phone might just have to “make.believe” that it is an iPhone.