Wednesday, January 10, 2007

The Marketing of the Nintendo Wii

Over the holidays, my family was in Santa Fe, NM visiting my brother-in-law and his family. They have a Nintendo Wii so, much to my seven-year-old son's (and frankly, my) delight, we got to spend a significant amount of time playing with it. After having hours of fun with the Wii, like David Pogue of the NY Times, even though I am not a gamer, I feel compelled to write about it.

The Wii is not only the coolest gaming system out there right now but I am extremely impressed with what Nintendo is pulling off from a marketing perspective. Explicitly, they are targeting non-gamers like myself but the brilliant part is that they have the hard core gamers as probably their biggest fans. My brother-in-law and his wife have two teenage sons who are hard core gamers and they LOVE the Wii. The scene over the holidays was something to behold -- you had everybody from my seven-year-old son to my wife (who is less of a gamer than me and that is saying something) to our teenage nephews, all having fun playing with the Wii together. This goes against Marketing 101 where you are told to target a particular market segment. Bravo, Nintendo!

BTW, for those of you who are fortunate enough to have a Wii, if you don't have the game, Rayman Raving Rabbids, I highly recommend you purchase it. You will never have this much fun again with a bunch of lunatic rabbits!

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