“The 2008 Blu-ray Disc Report” as released by the NPD Group is interesting in many ways, none more so than the findings that:

- 45 percent of HDTV owners know about the Blu-ray format
- 9 percent of HDTV owners plan to buy a BD-capable player in the next six months
- 6 percent of consumers plan to purchase a BD device in the next six months
- Current Blu-ray owners expect 80 percent of their upcoming purchases will be in BD rather than standard DVD.

We may deduce from the above that;
- Once a consumer has a Blu-ray player, they will purchase most of their movies on the BD format.
- Awareness of the Blu-ray format is fairly low
- Any benefits of moving from DVD (or another format) to Blu-ray are not deemed worth the price of upgrading to Blu-ray.

The GoBluRay MBA offers the following advice:

The Product Lifecycle illustrates that Blu-ray is still in ‘Early Growth’. In order to move into the ‘Late Growth’ stage prices will need to decrease, public product education will need to be more pronounced and competition will need to be greater (all of these points are related and co-dependant).

The Theory of Constraints teaches us that we need to identify and remove bottlenecks. The most obvious Blu-ray bottleneck is that many movies aren’t available on Blu-ray (even Shrek isn’t available on Blu-ray) therefore reducing consumer demand for Blu-ray.

GoBluRay recommends borrowing a concept from the bestselling book ‘Marketing Warfare’ by Ries and trout. What Blu-ray needs to do is shift to becoming competitor oriented rather than customer oriented. By this we imply the Blu-ray format needs to focus on selling the benefits of the Blu-ray format over DVD (and other mediums) rather than focusing on customer needs and wants. Once the competitors (e.g. DVD) perception is reduced in the mind of the customer, Blu-ray will really take off.

source: http://gobluray.com