“Culturally connected” 360 marketing will help break southern Europe, says Lewis

[cgen]

I live in a Southern Europe country and I think the problem is brand name.
At least in my country, people usually take the name of the most successful product and associate it to the hole class where it belongs.
eg:
all MP3 players are called iPod;
all brands of cola are called coca-cola;
all video discs formats are called DVD;
although less frequently, sometimes all optical discs are CDs


In the early 90s, the most known brand here was SEGA and consequently whether you had a mega drive (genesis in USA) or an SNES you'd have to describe it to your parents and/or friends as a SEGA. For the portables, until the GBA, all of them were Gameboys.
In the mid-90s, that changed. the PS1 started to be heavily marketed and fastly became the most popular. Nowadays the name "Playstation" is used to describe all of the game consoles. When the PSP came out, its name started to be used for all the portables. Currently, the DS is referred as a dual-screen PSP. And I'm talking about 30, 40 and a few 20 year old people.

This happens to a certain degree in software as well. If you ask someone to tell you the name of a:
driving game => Gran Turismo
Sports game => PES
party game => buzz
music game => singstar
And any game they mention will likely to be thought as a playstation exclusive.
Earlier today I talked about super mario galaxy to a guy and he told me he thought Nintendo didn't existed anymore.

Here, the playstation family represents more than 90% of the market share.
Unless microsoft/nintendo (wich both have third parties distributing their products) can at least change the popular notion of what a console is, they'll never get bigger market shares.

My country might not be that great of a market but I remember to read a few years ago, probably 2003, that PS2 sales had reach 100k. Which I think is isn't bad in a 10 million population with one of the lowest average personal incomes in the UE-15.

Sorry for bad english.
thanks for your patience. lol