For my external marketing blog, I stumbled upon this very interesting blog post for Nintendo’s new gaming system, the Wii U. Now, in my opinion the system takes away the fun of gaming with friends and encourages kids to not be social as they can ignore other people in the room and still play their games. But this is not the most shocking part. This campaign should raise a few eyebrows!!

They are comparing it to their own product, and pretty much saying our other product is bad so don’t buy it!! How does that make any sense!! The Wii is already known to be a bit of an inferior system to the PS3 and XBOX 360, so it should be comparing the new features of the Wii U to these systems and showing how these new features make their system more appealing for younger children who want to play video games (as that is the segment that Nintendo serves). This contradicts basic marketing strategy; you want to differentiate yourself from your competitors, not yourself!! This will only hurt sales as it pretty much trashes their own system, and those who don’t like the idea will behind the Wii U, but are told by Nintendo that the Wii is not as good as the Wii U the customer does not want, will just take their business to either Sony or Microsoft for another game system, and Nintendo will loose sales. I am in full agreement with the blog post I read, as it is just absurd that this is a marketing campaign that a company would use for their own product as it hurts themselves in hopes of attracting customers to their product. But the bigger question is, anyone interested in the Wii U will not be interested in the Wii as they will want the newer system, so will the comparison provide any value to them if the Wii was never an option for them.