Simply Different: A Brand Advantage

How Nintendo beat the giants using innovation

Brand Strategy Insider, September 11, 2009 — Marketing is a battle of categories. The brand is only a marker for the category itself. If you want an energy drink, you reach for a Red Bull. If you want soy milk, you buy Silk. Rental DVDs by mail? Netflix.

Creating a new category and then branding that category in such a way that your brand is perceived as the innovator and category leader (in both senses of the word) is the essence of marketing today. To create a new category, however, you have to think different, not better.

Keeping Up Nintendo's Momentum†

As Wii Products Leave Pipeline, Iwata Looks to Services, New Gamers for Growth

Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2008 — After overseeing several years of rapid growth at Nintendo Co., President Satoru Iwata faces new challenges: how to keep players of the company's videogames interested, and how to cultivate a new wave of customers.

Under the 48-year-old Mr. Iwata, Nintendo has already redefined videogames and widened their appeal beyond the typical young male player who favors fast, action-packed games. Its DS portable game device, launched in November 2004, has attracted young women and an older audience with a touch-sensitive screen players can write on and simpler games, such as the brain-training quiz game Brain Age and the virtual-pet game Nintendogs. The Wii videogame console, released two years later, allows users to wield a controller as they would a tennis... continue reading

Best Global Brands

How five names in this year's rankings staged their turnarounds

BusinessWeek, August 6, 2007 — Reviving even a storied brand isn't easy once consumers have a negative perception of it...Still, it's possible to stage a brand comeback. Several such stories emerged in this year's ranking.

Wii will rock you

How Nintendo's new game machine won over the world - and beat the pants off Sony and Microsoft

FORTUNE, June 11, 2007 — Nintendo's legendary videogame designer Shigeru Miyamoto is lying face down on the floor in Kyoto, Japan, hobbled by a right cross and struggling to regain his composure. The man some credit with the very existence of the $30 billion videogame industry, the Walt Disney of our generation, has taken one blow to the face too many.

Lessons from Apple†

What other companies can learn from California's master of innovation

Economist, June 7, 2007 — For a company that looked doomed a decade ago, it has been quite a comeback. Today Apple is literally an iconic company.

Wrigley's Candystand Is Sweet on Nintendo's Wii†

Capitalizes on Browser That Allows Users to Play Adver-games on Console

Advertising Age, February 19, 2007 — Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. is riding Nintendo's Wii wave with the launch of a free web portal offering games users can play on their Wii consoles. Without any contact with Nintendo, the gum giant is linking its popular adver-gaming site, candystand.com, to the hugely successful game console through Nintendo's Wii browser.