Nintendo has been in the business of making home entertainment consoles since 1986. The company started out with their first system the NES, which stands for Nintendo Entertainment System. The system was also called the Famicom in Japan. The company has consistently marketed their consoles as family friendly alternatives to common consoles, especially in recent history with the advent of the Nintendo Wii. This article aims to discuss a few of the things that Nintendo is doing right with the Wii, as well as a few of the things that they are doing wrong with it.

The Wii’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The Wii has always been targeted to families as a family-friendly way to enjoy video games with your friends and family. However, many hardcore gamers do not like the Wii because the games are perceived to be for children, as opposed to adult gamers. However, this strategy helped the Wii to become the most popular console during its launch. The console even beat out the PS3 and the Xbox 360 in its first month. Many stores could not keep the Wii in stock because it continued to fly off of shelves. However, as time went on, and the market cooled off, the Wii’s sales dropped significantly. However, PS3 and Xbox continued to steadily sell.

Nintendo has done an excellent job marketing the Wii through television ads. They consistently debut their new products by way of television ads. In addition, Nintendo markets their in-house games extremely efficiently. A good example of this is the Super Mario Galaxy line of video games, which received heavy marketing in large chain stores such as Wal-Mart and Target.

Nintendo has also set up a website that showcases some of the Wii’s features. Although this is technically online marketing, Nintendo has not yet taken advantage of some of the great features of the new wave of social networking. Many companies are catching on to this form of marketing, and are using Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites to get their brand out there. Nintendo would be wise to implement some of these strategies, especially because the main age group that they are missing out on is 15 to 25 year old males. This age group is the primary users of these social networking sites.

Although Nintendo has done a good job of marketing the Wii to their target group, they could stand to expand their audience by widening their marketing view.