Everything is better than Vita marketing

You're comparing apples to oranges. And smartphone game developers and their marketing teams are willing to be far, far more unscrupulous with their marketing. As in they will straight up ignore telling you jack about the game and just try to drag you in with various forms of emotional appeal.

Not defending Nintendo, they need to get back to where they were at the start of the Wii generation or even better back to the launch of the N64 where they marketed their differences as being the coolest part about them. Get N or Get Out basically amounted to "Yeah, we're different. Don't like that? Well **** you" presented in such a way that it made the games and console feel badass. The Wii U could actually use such an add, especially with Smash, Kart, Bayo2, Hyrule Warriors out and Zelda, Splatoon, Xenoblade, and Devil's Third on the way, all games that could easilly be spun for this kind of approach.

Brilliant post, well said. Its quite easy to run Nintendo from the comfort of your armchair apparently.

Yeah, Nintendo's marketing have kind of sucked these past few years. I haven't seen any at all actually here in Sweden.

Of course mobile companies are spending more money on marketing their games, but this is also true of mobile games over all traditional console companies.

So Nintendo's philosophy of basically never marketing at all is the smart play? 

I'm not saying they should spend a billion dollars doing something stupid like buying Capcom because I like Megaman or something idiotic like that; but having some mindshare with the general audience might be something worth investing in rather than letting your competitors (from both angles, MS/Sony on one front, and smartphones on the other) basically have free reign while you sit back twiddling your thumbs doing nothing for years at a time. 

At some point the whole "we don't like to compete (Iwata's own words), because we're Nintendo, we're a special snowflake" just becomes a load of bull sh*t. 

Sony and MS market constantly on television (successfully at that). Marketing has been essential to most successful home consoles. There's nothing magical or special about marketing a console game vs a smartphone game. 

NOA in general needs to be completely overhauled, it's fairly plain as day they are incompetent. No you wouldn't want a fanboy running the company, but someone with some actual understanding of the business who's more progressive and Westernized, understands modern (not 1980s) marketing, would be a world of help. 

Free to play advertisements are probably very effective. It doesn't take a lot of effort to try a game out once you see a commercial for it. You can download it in no time nowadays.

Who even plays these things? I don't know a single person IRL that does. Yet, I know that plenty do.. Scary world out there.

Apple sold 74 million iPhones in the three months of Oct-Dec '14 alone. To put that in perspective, Nintendo is struggling to hit 9 million 3DS' for their entire fiscal year (12 months) worldwide even with a new model revision. 

It's estimated that at least half of smartphone buyers game on their phone regularily/semi-regularily. And that's just iPhone alone, doesn't count other phone brands (Android) or tablets at all. 

Unless you live in 2004, odds are you know someone who plays smartphone games. 

Good point. However, I think the point that some people try to make here is that smartphone games might be a threat for Nintendo, more than for Sony or MS.