In regards to relationship marketing, Nintendo frequently sends customers who sign up for the Club Nintendo membership service deals and sales via email that is exclusive to these members.The more one spends on Nintendo products and registers on the website, the more rewards and opportunity for deals are presented by Nintendo. Besides Club Nintendo, Nintendo is similar to its competitors in that it typically has little to no knowledge of it's customer's shopping habits(due to most of their products being sold via outside stores such as Gamestop and Best Buy.) and thus, have generally poor relationship marketing strategy relying on brand loyalty for sales.
Nintendo however serves as a platform for other developers. Independent video game studios either design or port(a process of optimizing a video game made on competitor's consoles to work on multiple consoles) games on Nintendo consoles. While not as reliant on 3rd party developers as Sony and Microsoft, a great portion of games available on Nintendo consoles come from them. In order for those developers to make or port games on Nintendo consoles, they have to go into an agreement with Nintendo, pay licensing fees and also pay for development kits("DevKits") to properly program the games on the console. In exchange, Nintendo gives the games it's iconic seal of quality and then publishes and distributes the games. Nintendo is VERY serious about the content available on it's consoles so it's very selective on the games they allow for publishing, which has many 3rd party developers prefering to publish on Sony and Microsoft platforms instead(Electronic Arts being notorious for skipping out on making Nintendo ports of their games).
From what I just mentioned, it seems like Nintendo doesn't have a very reliable business marketing strategy when it comes to dealing with outside developers. Nintendo now has to rely on internally developed and published games for a majority of it's profits. This isn't good at all as seen with it's continued losses and booming successes of it's competitor's consoles and game sales.
http://www.wired.com/2014/01/nintendo-forecast/
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Ch. 8 - Segmenting and Targeting Markets
Following Nintendo all this time has made it clear that it's actual target market is young and single consumers who are not burdened by too many responsibilities and have more disposable income than other types of consumers. From children to young adults (5-24) is Nintendo's main focus.
Nintendo products are also widely available across most of the 1st world, with several game specialty shops, electronic stores such as Best Buy and even some department stores like Target and Walmart. Add on top of its widely available product line is the fact that Nintendo products are cheaper in price than it's competitors Sony and Microsoft, making them more appealing to young consumers who may not have the means to afford the others.
That's not to say that Nintendo has been entirely 100% focused on young and single consumers however. Within recent memory, Nintendo has been going for a more family oriented approach to marketing. Beginning with its Wii system, Nintendo has been aiming to get all members of the family involved in some form of gaming using the gimmick of motion controls using an easy to navigate set of controllers. In this regards it has been highly successful as the Wii has even been used in elderly homes as a form of therapy.
With that said,Nintendo's newest system, the Wii U seems to only be targeting the young market again. The Wii U has ditched the motion controllers in exchange for a tablet/controller hybrid and the games available are more focused on hobbyist gamers(as in consumers who play games more often and of different varieties than others). The gimmick of motion controls of course like all gimmicks became tiresome and so Nintendo had to go in another direction. The good part about this is that it gave Nintendo a fresh new direction to focus on game development. The bad part however is that it has put it in direct competition with Sony and Microsoft's newer consoles as well which is turning out to not go well in Nintendo's favor.
Nintendo products are also widely available across most of the 1st world, with several game specialty shops, electronic stores such as Best Buy and even some department stores like Target and Walmart. Add on top of its widely available product line is the fact that Nintendo products are cheaper in price than it's competitors Sony and Microsoft, making them more appealing to young consumers who may not have the means to afford the others.
That's not to say that Nintendo has been entirely 100% focused on young and single consumers however. Within recent memory, Nintendo has been going for a more family oriented approach to marketing. Beginning with its Wii system, Nintendo has been aiming to get all members of the family involved in some form of gaming using the gimmick of motion controls using an easy to navigate set of controllers. In this regards it has been highly successful as the Wii has even been used in elderly homes as a form of therapy.
With that said,Nintendo's newest system, the Wii U seems to only be targeting the young market again. The Wii U has ditched the motion controllers in exchange for a tablet/controller hybrid and the games available are more focused on hobbyist gamers(as in consumers who play games more often and of different varieties than others). The gimmick of motion controls of course like all gimmicks became tiresome and so Nintendo had to go in another direction. The good part about this is that it gave Nintendo a fresh new direction to focus on game development. The bad part however is that it has put it in direct competition with Sony and Microsoft's newer consoles as well which is turning out to not go well in Nintendo's favor.
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