How one product got Real People, into the Virtual World, Really!(Part 1)

Conventional wisdom suggests that we define our target consumers as clearly as possible and focus the marketing energies towards them.

Conventional wisdom suggests we develop a product that addresses existing consumer needs.

Conventional wisdom also suggests that we launch products that are better than the competition or give the same benefits at a better price!

Now imagine going back in time to the middle of 2006 and visualize yourself as a senior management person in a game manufacturing and marketing company.

Your company is losing market share (and perhaps money too!) globally. You are competing with the biggest names in Consumer Electronics and Software Development. Your competition has marketing Dollars, strong brands and products that are technically far more sophisticated than what you have ever made! Industry watchers have all but written your company off, as a potential competition for the rest of the players.
This is where your business is and you are thinking hard how to improve your company’s situation.

In the middle of this your product development team comes to you for a project review and your chief product development officer shows you a product concept that is totally different from what competition has ever done.
The new product concept is technically less sophisticated and most importantly it expects the consumer to change the way they have been consuming the product in the past. It has none of the benefits that your competition is focusing on (and leading the market because of).
Although the product can potentially be marketed at a price lower than the competition, but it makes you wonder how would, the existing users adopt this entirely new concept. The whole market is structured so differently in comparison to this innovation that you have, that going with this innovation looks like a large sized risk!

What would you do?


Some of you, by now, already know what we are talking about. But frankly chances are that had one of us been in a situation like this we would have asked the personnel in our project team to update their Résumé’s and do the needful, while we went looking out to hire the minds that made the smart products that the competition was marketing.

However, what actually happened was very different from the scenario we painted above. The project team got a green signal to go ahead and develop the prototype into a full fledged product and in a few months we had a new product hitting the store shelves – something that we now know as the Nintendo Wii. In hindsight, every great (& risky) idea looks like simple logic. However, things are very different in foresight. In foresight things are unclear, uncertain, laden with risk and very subjective. It is the foresight that puts individual judgment to the ultimate test. It is a moment of truth for our conviction and courage as we evaluate an idea.
We believe that Nintendo Wii has been developed on the shoulders of unconventional Creativity and it has been brought to the market, on the shoulders of unparalleled Conviction & Courage.