Nintendo marketer of the year

[Avinash_Tyagi]

http://adage.com/article?article_id=121039

 

Nintendo Is Ad Age's Marketer of the Year

...While Marketers Picked Apple as Their Choice



By Beth Snyder Bulik



Published: October 13, 2007

Question: Can a new product not only radically revive a company but also reinvigorate an entire industry?



Answer: Wii.



In much the way Apple made music aficionados out of mere music buyers, Nintendo via its Wii system has created a passionate group of devotees out of people who previously couldn't have cared less about video games. Wii broke open a market long confined predominantly to young men and welcomed in the rest of the family.



"They have absolutely changed the industry," says Julie Shumaker,



VP-sales for in-game agency Double Fusion and former Electronic Arts national sales director. "They brought people who don't consider themselves gamers into gaming. Data show people ... still don't consider themselves gamers -- and they own a Wii. Sheer marketing brilliance."



Born in marketing

One might argue that a hot product with innovative features and styling is not a marketing coup. But Wii and the handheld DS, along with their innovative software titles and accessories, were born in marketing.



Stocked with family-friendly games and the motion-sensing Wiimote that gets couch potatoes on their feet, Wii embraced all entertainment-seeking consumers. Entire workouts are built around Wii, as users shed pounds by playing games. Nintendo is extending its influence beyond the world of gaming to make its mark on how mass audiences interact.



"Just look at the way people consume entertainment today. The idea that you would spend hours playing video games is just not real anymore," says Robert Matthews, senior director-consumer marketing at Nintendo of America. Wii can just as well attract users for a quick set of tennis as it can for an uninterrupted afternoon of play.



"A major insight that Nintendo had early on was that they saw that gamers were getting bored, even though they didn't know it yet," says Perrin Kaplan, VP-marketing and corporate affairs at Nintendo of America.



Gamers and nongamers

Video-game sales were starting to flatten in North America. In a dash of in-home market research, Nintendo executives saw their own families divided into gamers and nongamers. Instead of a problem, they saw an opportunity.



So while other video-game makers were busy trying to incorporate gamers' intense demands into their next-generation hardware, Nintendo set out to create products that could change the dynamics of gaming and expand the audience well beyond what it had MARKETER OF THE YEAR




Wii made its debut last November with $200 million in marketing support, but Nintendo and its agencies had been forming the game plan since January 2006.



It began almost as a study in how to ignore your best consumers -- in this case, the young males who dominate gaming. If Nintendo had followed the traditional road map of shooter games popular with the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation crowds, there likely would be many more powerful and expensive boxes gathering dust in the gaming aisle.



Ambassadors

Yet Nintendo invited her, like the others, to become a Wii Ambassador in a program that began before the November launch and continued after the system's debut. GolinHarris, Los Angeles, devised the ambassador program and handled an aggressive press push for the Wii.



The "ambassador" title, though lofty sounding, basically meant hosting a Wii party for 30 or so like-minded friends. Ms. Butler's "Moms Night Out" drew 27 maternal units -- no kids or dads -- and was a "huge, smashing success," says Ms. Butler, mother of a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. "Everyone who came who didn't already own a Wii ... ordered one or two. Plus a lot of them are bloggers, and they all blogged about what a great experience it was." Ms. Clark says the same thing happened at her party.



Appropriate for a tech-driven company like Nintendo, it was word-of-mouth marketing that



started at the grass roots and then spread digitally.





With the Alpha Moms, Nintendo did more than just ring sales. Aside from converting a bunch of nongamers into customers, it created fans and advocates for Wii gaming.



"My perspective as a parenting blogger who gets hit up big time by PR companies all the time is [Nintendo] really did it right," Ms. Butler says. "You can send out products to people all day, but they took the time to come to my house and set up a party. ... If they had just shipped me one, it would probably still be in the box."



Longevity

There are nonbelievers who write off Nintendo's game systems, particularly the Wii, as a passing fad.



"They're doing to Sony what Sony did unto them," says Mike Goodman, an analyst at Yankee Group. "They're capturing gaming households. ... And they've done the best job in marketing that they've expanded the marketplace."



But Mr. Goodman says he sees only another year or maybe two of Wii dominance, pointing to a slowing in the Japanese market, where the Wii is outselling the competition 3-to-1 vs. 6-to-1 earlier in the year. "They're tapping out their market," he says.



And while most believe sales will continue to be strong in the near term, Nintendo in 2008 will face serious marketing challenges of its own making. Much of its seasoned marketing staff in the U.S., including its chief marketing executive, Mr. Harrison, as well as Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Matthews, will leave the company at the end of the year when Nintendo of America relocates its sales and marketing offices from Redmond, Wash., to San Francisco and New York.



Fresh blood

"That team did much to build this success, and I'm concerned that a new marketing group might not get it," says IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon.



But the departing team has faith. "It really comes down to a very essential strategy if Nintendo is truly going to expand the marketplace with products," Mr. Matthews says. "It can't be an 'or' strategy; it has to be an 'and' strategy, and it also needs to be built on a strategy of advocacy."



In 2007, Nintendo didn't just change the video-game industry; it changed entertainment dynamics. In addition to coaxing generations of consumers to play, it inspired a new kind of entertainment interaction that's got the whole world trying to figure out how to cash in.



As we all await the next Wii-nomenon.



What's in a name? A lot when it comes to Wii

And now the back story on that crazy name.



When Nintendo announced in April 2006 that it was changing the code name of its forthcoming console from Revolution to its permanent moniker, Wii, the world said, "What?"



Nintendo executives can't be that naïve, right? They do know what people will think of, right? Wait, is it maybe just a strategy to build buzz?



No, yes and sort of.



Nintendo was not naïve. In fact, it hired a respected branding and naming giant, Interbrand, to come up with the name (along with dozens of others that were discarded).



And, yes, Nintendo executives did know the urinary connotation of the word. They were prepared for the jokes and snickers but also knew those would run their course.




And, they ask, a year and a half later, can you imagine it being called anything else?



Well, no, actually, Wii can't.



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