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Apple, Nintendo Top The 2012 Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend Study November 3, 2011 The 2012 Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend study by Harris interactive is making Nintendo very happy today. While game systems in general receive higher scores than other technologies surveyed in Harris Interactive's annual survey, Nintendo Wii earns the overall highest score among all technology brands included in the study. Jeni Lee Chapman, Executive Vice President and leader of Harris' Brand and Communication Consulting group, observes, "For video gaming to have the highest equity scores compared to all other tech categories, and Wii the highest within the category, implies that Wii has serious potential to stretch into other products. Just as Apple entered the hearts and minds of consumers through music with iTunes and the iPod, Nintendo has entered into youth's heart with their video gaming platform. One day we may be saying, 'move over Apple, here comes Wii.'" Apple's various brands also did surprisingly well in the Computer, Mobile Phone and Computer Tablet categories. The Youth EquiTrend report "calculates brand equity by measuring familiarity, quality, and purchase consideration." From there an average score for each category is developed and the "Brand of the Year" is then awarded to the highest ranking brands in their respective categories. Within the 13 youth interest categories that comprise the study, there are four technology, telecommunication, and gaming groups: computers, mobile phones, computer tablets, and video gaming platforms. Apple Computers is the 2012 Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend Computer Brand of the Year, followed by Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Dell. Apple's iPhone is the 2012 Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend Mobile Phone Brand of the Year. HTC phones, Samsung phones, and LG phones follow in rank order. iPad is the 2012 Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend Computer Tablet Brand of the Year. Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook, and Samsung Galaxy round out the brands that rank above category average. Among all youth, the Nintendo Wii is the 2012 Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend Video Gaming Platform Brand of the Year, followed by the Sony Playstation 3 and then the Nintendo DS. This year's Harris Poll Youth EquiTrend study was conducted online among 5,077 U.S. consumers ages 8-24 in August, 2011. A total of 121 brands were rated among 8-12 year olds and 167 brands among 13-24 year olds. Each 8-12 year old respondent was asked to rate a total of 15 randomly selected brands and each 13-24 year old respondent was asked to rate a total of 22 randomly selected brands. Each brand received at least 130 ratings. Data was weighted to be representative of the entire U.S. population of consumers ages 8-24 on the basis of age, sex, education, urbanicity (8-17 year olds) race/ethnicity, region, parental education (8-17 year olds) and income (18-24 year olds), and data from respondents ages 18 and over were also weighted for their propensity to be online.

Something to make up for those Japanese youths who don't like Wii.

Nintendo has won the hearts of the children. Now they have to win the hearts of the hardcore video game nerd in his mid teens to late twenties.

It seems that a lot of the children out there are smarter than the adults.

This bodes well for the future.

It means that there is a market for NIntendo ... and that it will continue to succeed.
Meanwhile, how many times can you plan WW3 (or FPS games in general) on other machines?

Mike from Morgantown

I dunno its interesting to here Wii won out over 360/PS3 but I am not convinced that this will translate into high sales of WiiU. DS was the most successful handheld of all time and 3DS failed at launch due to price and lack of software. Brand recognition alone cannot sell hardware. PlayStation learnt that the hard way with PS3.

I think Nintendo will need to work very hard to maintain this dominance next generation. They will need just as many amazing first party titles and even more third party higher quality titles. Fact is their are multiple factors which could lead to WiiU bombing regardless of brand recognition!

3DS hasn't really done much worse/better than the DS originally did... and we know how that turned out.

Still DS had it much tougher last time around. And unless we see big stuff from 3DS soon (ala brain training for DS), I doubt the 3DS will emulate DS's success. Not that it won't be succesful, but probably not as much

At launch 3DS was doing terrible as far as I know it was way under DS's levels it wasn't until the price cut was announced that things started to turn around. Which is why I specifically say "Failed at launch" this shows that the brand recognition was not enough to sell the hardware , Nintendo had to take a loss on every hardware unit to achieve the level of success DS had.

Then factor in the fact that software sales are dismal and that hardware can't be cut further if the system begins to struggle. Usually Nintendo can cut hardware every year or two but at 169.99$ Nintendo can't afford to cut the hardware in the foreseeable future.

In the end I was just pointing out that brand recognition while useful is not a determining factor in a consoles success. Wii proved that when it trounced PlayStation despite Nintendo's brand recognition having dropped drastically in popularity! In the end solid software, solid hardware, good marketing and reasonably priced hardware is far more important to a consoles success then brand recognition!

1) Where is it printed that the 3DS @ $169 is losing money per unit? All estimates I've read said cost of materials is around $100-$110 and then adding in everything else that goes into the retail product, I'm sure its either barely profitable or really close to it. Nintendo was just hoping DS popularity and titles that didn't' make it to launch window would allow it to sale successfully with a very large margin.

2) 3DS launched in February (beg) and had its price cut in July (beg); 5 months. In that time frame it sold ~3.3m units. DS launched in November 2004 (end) and if you move 5 months out to April 2005 (end), you have sales of ~4.9m units.... and that includes the DS launching during the holiday period in NA and Japan (3DS has yet to hit the holidays).

While this is less by 1.6m units or ~30% less in sales, you are talking about a $100 increase in price or 40% increase in price and no holiday sales. I would not consider the 3DS launch a "failure" given this info based on DS sales.

3DS hasn't failed at all. Nintendo's projects failed to take into account the price and lack of content as well as the misconception that it would match the current sales of a mature and very cheap DS product with tons of content.