Get this: create value, or sink
March 9th, 2011This message from theDuct Tape Marketing blog by Jon Jantsch should speak to a lot of people: behind all the hype you generate with amazing marketing, you have to back it up with some good value creation. This is a rather simple idea, that marketing is a great way-paver to make a grande high-profile entry for an awesome new product, but it could lead to death sentence for a product which does not live up to the expectations.
Now let’s examine the pairing of a famous flop versus one of the most innovative products of the decade:
Flop: The N-Gage
Remember this little “taco”? It was Nokia’s pathetic attempt at nibbing off a portion of Nintendo’s Game Boy market. The system that promised to revolutionize the handheld experience died off officially in 2007 with a mere 3 million units sold (compared to over 220 million units sold of the Game Boy line). Why did it fail after so much hype was built around its launch? Because the consumers saw no value in it. It was a great chunk of gear to carry around, uncomfortable for both gaming AND mobile calling. The interface was far from friendly, the hardware was unfashionable, and it was highly UNcompatible with the Greatest Hits titles which were readily available for the Game Boy. So the N-Gage was launched, then struggled for a few years, and was left in the dust by the release of the iPhone.
Hit: The Nintendo Wii
The Wii revolutionized (pun intended, the Wii’s original name was Nintendo Revolution) home entertainment, as the Nintendo DS had handheld entertainment. Its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, had a lot to live up to as he was the also the creator of the gaming prodigies, Mario and Zelda. Unlike Miyamoto’s failure with Virtua Boy (Nintendo’s flopped attempt at 3D gaming in its earlier stages), the Wii was a tremendous success, in fact, it had surpassed its predecessor, the NES, with 70 million units sold. This is because Nintendo made clearly communicated the “values” of the Wii to its target market.