The month of October clearly shows us how this generation of consoles will fair in sales numbers when the dust fades off. PS3 will suffer and so will Sony, Microsoft have now developed a strong software play form with which they can move forward from, but they will have to be careful and Nintendo is just a great success story, the biggest one in the short lifespan of video gaming to date.

Now, I will argue that these companies have failed and succeeded because of one factor alone, as it always has, namely “internal communication” and “Public Relations”. Why do I say this? Well, just look at the confusion among Play station employees and their respective offices around the world, there wasn’t a single coherent word spoken from the different managers during the first year. Also, they fired the founder of the brand and replaced him. They had vastly different commercials without a strong theme and they did not succeed in creating an image for the new product that stuck in peoples mind.

Now, take Microsoft. They did what Play station could not; create a coherent message around its product from day one. Thus us what we are, this is how it works and this is what you can do whit it… simple, straight forward and on the point marketing.

The message salience on the channels was huge, same message all the time, a slogan, a sound bite that tide the brand in to it and a color scheme yhay stuck.  The “Live” service became a de facto in gaming, and the course was set.

Nintendo did a brilliant thing; they went their own route in marketing. The Wii brand is a toy, a simple toy. Both in marketing and price. You can buy the toy everywhere, in supermarkets, in toy stores etc. You don`t buy a Play station 3 in Toy`s R Us, you buy a Wii there. So, the market share was immediately on Nintendo’s side. They targeted families and the Nintendo fan-base I.E people way yhe cash.

They “leaked” information to the media, spun the journalist and flooded the channels with coherent advertisement and a clear image of the product. The Nintendo Wii system is vastly inferior to its counterparts, both in power and in functionality, but with a great marketing campaign, good media management and a great internal communication team, this does not matter. You can liken it to the political process and draw many comparisons between the two in terms of management of the media, news, information and PR.

Also, the lack of negative advertisement from the competitors, calling Nintendo out on the differences between the systems, telling the public that, “we are better”, just shows how much the gaming entertainment industry has to learn from well managed political campaign teams.