Why Wii Is Winning
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The Nintendo Wii is insulting the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in the sales department. As new sales figures are released every week, the Wii simply tromps on competition, yet the Wii is a small system that is underpowered by todays console standards and lacks a lot of third party support. This has many”hardcore”gamers (read: fanboys) scratching their heads. The answer is very simple: really effective marketing.
This is what Nintendo has done to create an insane word of mouth campaign that would make any marketer cream themselves:
- Stay silent at E3. Let the “brand fans” speculate as to what is going on.
- Introduce a new something that blows away an old method of doing things (in this case, the controller).
- Let the media storm go wild around this new method (people literally salivate over new methods).
- Create a very subversive “grass roots” marketing campaign. This campaign involved several of my generations favorite things including blogging (remember those parties Nintendo threw?) and in-show advertising (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park).
- Once Nintendo got the ball rolling with a grass roots campaign word of mouth took hold, and the snowball that is the Wii was well on its way.
- Create a conventional advertising campaign (TV and Internet) where it shows the average person playing games and having fun. Get real people to play the console — grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc … — to play the console.
- Wash, rinse, repeat.
The only thing Nintendo hasn’t counted on is the last of supply. I can guarantee you than the big N does NOT want the supply problem to be an ongoing issue. The more their supply chain is choked the more the hype dies.
When you look at it, Nintendo’s strategy was really simple: target a mostly ignored niche in their industry and out market their competition. Compared to Microsoft’s “pimp fly phat” MTV marketing and Sony’s “we’re so awesome you can’t begin to understand this pile of shit” marketing, Nintendo is a marketing god.
[tags]marketing, nintendo, wii[/tags]
One Comment
marc klink
April 11th, 2007
at 6:17pm
You’re forgetting possibly the most important motivator: price point. While we are being told on television about how wonderful the economy is, in the real world most people I talk to are being squeezed…they have less disposable income than perhaps 5 years ago. At a time when people are being underwhelmed by the price points versus performance of ‘the big 2′ Nintendo comes at a price point where people are willing to take a chance, and if they don’t decide it is next on the list that includes sliced bread, so what…it wasn’t that much money after all.