Companies such as Rio, Creative, Virgin Electronics, iRiver and Archos are pushing their design teams to challenge the iPod on function and fashion. “We live and breathe competition and talk about iPod every day,” said David Feldman, vice president for marketing in for Archos. “To come up against the 800-pound gorilla, we have to provide differences in our product mix. We have to have capabilities beyond the iPod.” Lisa O’Malley, Creative’s senior brand manager for portable media players, said as original iPod sales soared she realized there was more to the device. “We understood the whole thing with these players can’t be just functionality, that we always concentrated on,” she said. “People were using them as fashion statements.”
