Well I'm new to my job and I had this cool dude show me around and training me what to do. We were talking about video games. He tells me he's a big time Playstation fan, saying he just got the PS4 Star Wars bundle. I tell him I'm a huge Nintendo fan and he asked me if I had the Wii. I said yeah I did, I currently owned a Wii U. He looked at me funny and told me "I used to play mario kart wii a few years ago" and I asked him if he knew the difference between the Wii and Wii U and he said "They're not the same thing??" and wow that shocked me... This just proves that Nintendo did a TERRIBLE job on marketing the Wii U .. Or maybe he's just into Playstation and doesnt care about other systems idk. 

I imagine he has his Playstation blinkers on, and has little interest in Nintendo. I know a lot of non gamers who know what a Wii U is, even they can tell the difference between a controller that looks like a tv remote and one with a big fuck off screen on it.

Well if someone doesn't hang out on video game forums, is only interested in one console brand, which is not Nintendo of course, I can totally see how such a person would think Wii U is just some extension of Wii. It's pretty much widely regarded as being a marketing failure even among the casuals who owned Wii as their first ever game console. Some were thought Wii U was just the game pad and had (and still have) no idea that it's a whole new generation console. If you look at early Wii U ads it looks a bit like a remodelled Wii, and the main focus of the advertising was the gamepad. So I think it's not surprising that a lot of people don't really know what Wii U is.

All this proves is that you need good ads that explain everything clearly, because 90% of the worlds population these days has the attention span of a gold fish since technology has gotten better and better and they want everything spoon fed to them.

i.e. how many times do you get ask questions like is X out yet? how much does X cost? where do i buy X?

then you tell them go to google and they look at you funny like you told them to fuck off or i'll kill you..

Smartphones are the worst, there are kids who don't know which way is north south eat west. They ask stupid questions like were is X? Then you end up pointing to the left saying 200 meters that way lol. Even though they got it open on their smartphone with directions and an image of the building which if they just looked around they would see it lol.

DS...3DS...Wii...Wii U... it's obvious that Iwata thought that using a successful name would help ensure future success. I guess it doesn't work that way. I'd have called the Wii Revolution myself and named Wii-U something totally different.

Well I believe that it is a given that Nintendo fans and video game enthusiasts in general understand the Wii U. However, we are not representative of all console gamers, much less the broader gaming population. Therefore, I am not surprised that your colleague did not know what the difference between Wii and Wii U was. I believe much of this has to do with weak marketing from Nintendo.

While this is just one anecdotal example, I 100% believe that this type of thinking is incredibly common. Most people who at least take a casual interest in gaming will tell you that the current Nintendo home console is the Wii. Ask them what Wii U is and they will be thoroughly confused. It's sad but true.

Honestly? I believe you. Nintendo did horribly because they thought they were going to sell as much as they did with the wii, and I think when you are so high you kind of stop worrying because you think you´ve won it all. Even when you are at the top you have to work as hard as the first day, or you will start loosing users.
That´s why I´m so sure they will do great things with the next hardware they release, because they have worked twice as hard as they did for the wii u, or at least I hope they have learnt from their mistakes xD

many of my friends didnt knew the wii u as i got mine and told them. that was dec. 2014. friends 20-30 years old, interested in video games.

I've met fairly core gamers who didn't know that the Wii U WASN'T just the Gamepad synced up to a Wii. Nintendo initially even marketed it as such (which was a problem twofold since they never showed the Wii U console off itself until like August, three months before launch). It took them until, what?, late 2013/early 2014 to release commercials saying that the Wii U was different.