What Nintendo Taught Me About Advertising
About heritage brands, tech traps & blue oceans
On June 5th, the Nintendo Switch 2 launched, and now the first sales numbers are in.
In just eight weeks, the new gaming console has sold six million units and has surpassed all expectations.
The reviews are glowing and what was once thought to be a gimmicky hybrid console is the hottest thing in gaming.
As a lifelong nerd, I’m happy to see Nintendo do so well.
But as someone who has worked with tech brands for more than a decade, I’m even happier to see human-centric design beat its over-engineered competition.
While the whole world is losing its mind over AI, Nintendo has once more reminded us that technology is nothing but a means to an end.
Here’s the story about it, and what brands and agencies can learn from it.
Innovation & Reinvention
Nintendo was founded in 1889 and originally made playing cards.
Their first venture into digital entertainment came in the 1970s, but they didn’t become a global brand until 1985’s revolutionary Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
It’s rare for a heritage company to reinvent itself — and Nintendo has done it a few times since.
In the early days of video games, every new console was a technological leap forward.
From the 8-bit NES to the 16-bit SNES, the difference was vast — and advertising was as simple as showing the graphics and listing the specs.
Anyone with eyes could see the groundbreaking improvements.
Throughout the 1990s, competition got harder with Sega and Sony PlayStation taking big chunks of the market. The Nintendo 64 succeeded with exclusive titles but the tides were turning.
In the early 2000s, Nintendo could no longer fend off the competition.
The GameCube was no match for Sony’s PlayStation 2, and when Microsoft joined the fray with the Xbox, Nintendo no longer seemed relevant.
The console wars were raging, and Nintendo was losing.
Forced to try something new, Nintendo hit reinvention brilliance with 2006’s Nintendo Wii.
While Sony and Microsoft were fighting over tech specs and wooing the same audience of hardcore gamers, Nintendo eyed an opportunity no one else had seen.
Instead of going after the usual demographic (teenage boys), Nintendo made a console for the rest of the family.
With intuitive design and radically different motion controls, gaming was suddenly for everyone and even grandparents could join the fun.
The Wii became the best-selling Nintendo console up until then, and Nintendo was seemingly back… Until disaster struck.
Riding the success of the Wii, the successor should have been a shoo-in.
But 2012’s Nintendo Wii U almost bankrupted the company.
The launch lineup was a mess, the product name was confusing (many assumed it was a companion product to the Wii), and no one could figure out who it was for. Nintendo had forgotten the most essential question: Why are we doing this?
With the benefits of hindsight, I’d argue the Wii U wanted to be a hybrid console but bombed because it tried to combine audiences instead of bridging use cases.
It was a more complicated version of the Wii, supposedly appealing to hardcore PlayStation and Xbox gamers — but the marketing failed to articulate any value beyond incremental upgrade.
The consequence was Nintendo’s worst-performing console of all time — only 13.5M units sold as opposed to 101.5M for the Wii.
The new audience of casual gamers (that Nintendo themselves had helped create) moved on to mobile games, and even longtime Nintendo fans were left perplexed by the Wii U’s lack of direction.
This could’ve been the end of Nintendo, had the company not returned to its core.
Enter: Nintendo Switch.
With the launch of the Switch in 2017, Nintendo made a console that was once again focused on the user experience.
They identified a hole in the market — the gap between home consoles and mobile games — and more importantly identified an unexplored use case:
What if you could make your console experience mobile and make your mobile experience feel like a console?
Handheld consoles were too niche to fill the gap and had long been challenged by the rapidly growing mobile market. But the Switch wasn’t a handheld console. It was its own kind of hybrid that worked equally well on the go and in the living room.
Instead of bringing your bulky PlayStation on vacation, the Switch allowed you to move seamlessly from the living room to the train to wherever — and never miss a beat.
The Switch wasn’t nearly as advanced as the dominant PS4, but the versatility of use cases was far superior and the benefits were easy to understand.
It had a clear design identity (the unique silhouette and now iconic Joy-Cons), a deceptively simple tagline (“Switch and Play”) and launch games that showcased its versatility and strengths (Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and more).
Instead of fishing for customers in the same busy waters as the competition, Nintendo found an unexplored ocean by rethinking their value proposition. They rejected the arms race of tech specs and instead focused on where and how people could play.
The result? 153M units sold in eight years, the best-selling gaming console of its generation.
3 Frameworks to Escape the Tech Trap
When categories mature, brands often default to unimaginative feature escalation — more megapixels, faster processors, higher resolution — as if technical superiority alone could drive demand.
But beyond a certain point, consumers can’t (or don’t care to) differentiate specs.
Throughout the 2010s, gaming’s arms race slowed down, and the console wars were won not on power but on accessibility.
This was the genius of the Nintendo Switch; it was accessible everywhere.
After all, having 80% horsepower available 100% of the time is better than 100% horsepower available 50% of the time.
Human-centric innovation always wins because consumers buy usefulness in context, not capabilities in isolation.
Functional distinctiveness beats superior features — but all too often tech brands assume they can engineer their way to the future without asking why anyone should give a damn.
This was the mistake made by Microsoft when they launched the Zune in 2006 (the supposed “iPod killer”) but failed to translate its superior tech to human relevance.
Microsoft wanted to out-engineer Apple… but Apple wanted to put 1000 songs in your pocket.
Maybe an even better example is GoPro, which succeeded with a technologically inferior product in a saturated (and shrinking) camera market because other digital cameras competed on megapixels and capturing all of life’s details — but GoPro gave you a camera that could withstand all of life’s hardships.
Competing on performance alone without a clear “why” leads to feature fatigue and commoditization. And to make matters worse, engineering is disproportionately expensive compared to psychological solutions.
So, if you want to avoid the pitfalls of tech, here are three useful frameworks.
1. Find Your Blue Ocean (from Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim & Mauborgne, 2005)
Concept: Instead of competing in a crowded market (“red ocean”), brands can create a new space where there is no competition (“blue ocean”).
How Nintendo did it: Nintendo abandoned the graphics/spec war and unified the handheld and home console markets, inventing a hybrid category that sidestepped Sony’s and Microsoft’s battlefield.
In advertising: Agencies chasing the AI arms race are fighting in a red ocean. Use AI to solve problems or serve new audiences, don’t try to outdo competitors’ capabilities.
2. Focus on Jobs-to-Be-Done (From Christensen Institute)
Concept: People “hire” products to get a job done in their lives. The real competition is any solution that can do the job, not just category peers.
How Nintendo did it: Gamers “hire” the Switch for flexible play — the ability to game at home, on the go, or with friends without swapping devices. The competition is the divide between “console time” and “mobile time.”
In advertising: Approach the customer journey like an interaction designer would: make it more accessible by solving outlier problems for the user.
3. Use Category Entry Points (from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute)
Concept: Brands grow by being mentally available on more occasions. These occasions are the “entry points” to the category in the consumer’s mind.
How Nintendo did it: Nintendo bridged gaming’s entry points from “Friday night at home” to “commuting,” “vacation,” “waiting for dinner” and “family gatherings.” The Switch fits more mental availability moments than traditional consoles.
In advertising: Use AI tools to create dynamic touch points and hyper-personalized moments, not just generic slop and cheap flash.
The Antique Radio Factory: A Cautionary Tale
I once worked for a heritage tech brand — let’s call it the antique radio factory since it would be unprofessional to mention its name — that had fallen into almost every tech trap imaginable.
Like Nintendo, the antique radio factory had a rich history and a core audience of diehard fans.
But unlike Nintendo, it had not managed to adapt for the 21st century.
Bloated legacy tech and bad habits of yesteryear were hanging like an albatross around the company’s neck.
The once proud audio brand had been so hyper-focused on making ideal products for ideal customers that it first underestimated the rise of MP3s and since ignored streaming — and a decade later still suffered the obvious consequences.
“Our customers want the best possible sound”… until one day they didn’t.
Accessibility is king — and convenience is queen.
By reducing the audience to the people who would pay a premium for ideal but over-engineered solutions, the company had left itself vulnerable to disruption.
Human-centric design beats “tech for tech’s sake” every single time.
Ironically, the radio factory later tried to apply the three frameworks from before… it just didn’t know how to use them.
It identified a Blue Ocean — but refused to make efforts to get there.
It had designers championing Jobs-to-Be-Done — but product managers who would shut them down.
It talked about Category Entry Points — but mistook them for cells in a spreadsheet.
There is no framework or strategy that can save a rotten company culture.
Without willingness to fix the mistakes of the past, heritage is just legacy.
Change is uncomfortable but the alternative is irrelevance.
Nintendo knows this and has reinvented itself several times over.
But it’s a lot harder said than done.
The Lesson For Advertising
Right now, advertising is fighting its own version of the console wars — everyone is chasing the newest AI tools and optimization metrics. Just like Sony and Microsoft during the Wii era, both agencies and brands are competing on capability specs (we can produce 1000 variations in 30 seconds!) instead of finding human value.
It’s a predictable race to the bottom.
Advertising loves anything new and shiny but often forgets that novelty is a far cry from utility — like the Wii U was a shinier Wii but with less clarity.
That’s where we stand with AI; it’s new and shiny but its actual usefulness is still unclear.
Incremental AI upgrades are a red ocean. If everyone’s fishing in the same spot, the only outcome is diminishing returns and generic sameness.
For a while to come, we can sell the hype but the nagging question remains:
Who are we doing it for?
Technology is a powerful lure but it’s a means to an end.
Nintendo has one of the strongest brands in video games and the sales to back it up. Because they help their users play in new ways by focusing on the one thing that matters:
Humans.
Why do less?
