| Nintendo Wii: Lame Name, No Game | Today's Top Stories | ||||||||||||
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Page 2 of 3 Continued... "And Wii, as a name and a console, brings something revolutionary to the world of video games that sets it apart from the crowd."As a console, sure, it’s possible. But as a name, I question that statement. It may also be worth noting that "ii" means "good" in Japanese. I don’t think it’s worth noting anything. It’s could be good, but it’s not excellent or "revolutionary," which is the image companies should portray, especially when they are competing against the likes of Sony and Microsoft. Whatever happened to Marketing 101? Oh, one more thing, did you forget that Wii also has a connotation to urine in French? Game-industry analysts were swift with their responses. "Looks like a good solid name for Nintendo," said an optimistic Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director of Jupiter Research. "The key is making sure they follow up with a strong launch campaign to evangelise the new brand and help drive the message forward." At least Nintendo has a few experts on its side. Maybe there is hope for Nintendo. Notice the very last sentence. That’s great advice, but unfortunately, Nintendo could’ve saved (or spent to further enhance) the brand it decimated in a seemingly sudden move. Assuming Nintendo had kept the same name, it would’ve never had to invest millions in building a completely new brand. It’s clearly a poor strategy for Nintendo, and makes you wonder why Nintendo has a difficult time maintaining its market position. Michael Goodman, senior analyst of media and entertainment strategies at The Yankee Group, believes the name change is a mistake. "I thought Revolution had much more meaning," he told CNET.com.au sister site GameSpot.com. "It was an apt description for the console. It was a revolutionary design ... the controller is pretty revolutionary. Wii just doesn't do it for me. How do we even pronounce this? WEEE? I'm not sure this is technically a word. What is a WEE, W-I-I? You're building everything from scratch in terms of awareness and in terms of building a brand. Versus Xbox 360 -- you're taking the core Xbox brand and leveraging it to a new product. With PlayStation 3, it still has all those great attributes of the PlayStation." There you go. Now we another industry pundit taking the opposite approach to the aforementioned analyst, and frankly, this approach is the more favorable one, at least for the moment. The Nintendo Revolution is a next-generation console, and thus it’s obviously revolutionary. It fits its name perfectly. Wii defines nothing. While Goodman is correct in assessing the importance of brand leveraging, we can’t blame Nintendo for not picking "GameCube II" for its next-generation console. Revolution was and is the appropriate name that needed no changing. |
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