I confess, I love the art of marketing. I am on the record with people that know me that I believe that marketing is an art and not a science. An art that most people do not have a grasp of. When I see truly artful things in marketing it makes me want to high-five the person that thought of it. My latest high-five moment is the game Nintendogs for the Nintendo DS handheld game machine.
For those not clued in its likely that you do not have a 8-13 year old living at your house. To be more specific you likely do not have an 8-13 year old girl living at your house.
Nintendogs is one of latest games from Nintendo for their dual screen handheld game device the Nintendo DS. Nintendogs lets you own a cyber-dog that you can play with, throw things to, take for walks, scratch on the neck (with the stylus), talk to (speech rec) etc. They are amazingly real, thanks to the power of the DS.
I have to confess, I was drawn into the Nintendogs as well. A few weeks back I was talking to my 12 year old daughter about Nintendogs. I was waxing on about how cool it would be if when your DS was in proximity to another DS your dogs could play, sniff each others butts, etc. She rolled her eyes (in a loving way) and said, “Yeah that’s already in there”. Mortified, this is one of those parental moments when you realize, your child knows more about technology than you do. However, I feel vindicated that she cannot tell me which communication technology makes this cyber sniffing possible (802.11 using a proprietary format).
But here is the art-part. Girls go nuts over these ‘dogs’. Because I am incapable of looking at anything just for ‘fun’, the first thing I thought of was, oh my god… they just opened a huge market segment that previously did not buy Nintendo handhelds, GIRLS!
Understand, I have no ‘real’ data to support this other than my own little psychology lab that I’m running here. But this is huge, and meaningful in a way that most people will miss. If you haven’t seen Nintendogs, you gotta check it out.
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