I just finished reading The Tipping Point, a book about how "epidemics" -- in the sense of precipitous drops in crime rate, or new products becoming worldwide sensations -- take off after just a few key events take place. As one might imagine, whenever I read a business or marketing book these days I try to find out how it might relate to the game industry, and more specifically the Wii and DS success story.
I didn't realize it until the very end of the book, this time, when author Malcolm Gladwell gives some parting advice to people looking to leverage word-of-mouth advertising. As it turns out, Nintendo tried a very Tipping Point-like tactic before Wii launched.
In the month leading up to the launch of the Wii, Nintendo held "Ambassador Parties." The idea was that they'd contact people who lived in major cities around the country and tell them that they'd been invited to a special private Wii party to which they could bring about twenty friends. These people weren't just random lucky gamers, though, they were bloggers and active participants in online gaming discussions -- they were the sort of people that Gladwell describes in The Tipping Point as the types who start epidemics. They're the people who give advice to their friends on what to buy, but do it in such a passionate way that it has an effect far wider than the rest of us.
Nintendo didn't just do Ambassador Parties for gamers, because they were trying to start something different. In each city, after the gamer parties were done, they took the Wii setups and moved them into a hotel suite and invited blogger moms to come and try them. The next day, they took them to family homes and had cross-generational Wii parties. In San Francisco, they took the consoles to a local retirement community where a four-generation Japanese family all got to play together.
Is this good press for Nintendo? Sure -- in an age where bloggers can have the same sway as professional journalists, expanding "press events" to include the hobbyist press isn't a bad idea. But not only that -- they got Wii into the hands of a self-selected group of people who make it their business to get out there and tell their peers what is new and hot. Did it work? There's no way to know for sure which of Nintendo's marketing tactics for Wii -- and they were many -- is the one that paid off, but Gladwell would likely say that the Ambassador Parties were bigger deals than many assumed them to be.
