Ch. 7 - Business Marketing

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/