Sony's Marketing Department Hated the Walkman

In early 1979, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka asked the engineering team to modify a Pressman, the company's bulky cassette recorder for journalists, so he could listen to opera on long flights. The team stripped the recording circuitry, added a stereo amplifier, and built two headphone jacks so Ibuka could listen with his wife. Co-founder Akio Morita tried it, told them to commercialize it, and gave them four months to ship.

Internal opposition was almost total. Sony's own marketing group argued, on the record, that nobody would buy a tape player that couldn't record. The dealer network agreed. The accepted wisdom was that headphones were antisocial and a portable stereo without a speaker was a product missing a feature. Morita overrode all of it.

The other engineering bet was the headphones. Existing stereo models weighed 300 to 400 grams and felt like wearing shoes on your skull. Sony's H-AIR MDR3, designed for the Walkman, weighed 50 grams. Without that part the device would have been a curiosity; with it, you could walk around for an hour and forget you had it on.

The TPS-L2 went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, at ¥33,000, around $150. Sony's own sales forecast was 5,000 units a month. The first two months moved 30,000. By the time the cassette format died, Sony had sold roughly 200 million Walkmans across more than 300 models, and the word had entered the dictionary as a generic noun.

The lesson Morita repeated for the rest of his career was that customer research can't tell you about a product the customer hasn't seen. The marketing department was right that nobody had asked for it. They were wrong that this meant nobody would want it.