David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…The reason you buy something from Nintendo is all sorts of reasons, but not because it says Nintendo. Their nearest competitor doesn't have any of the same features and capabilities that they have. It doesn't have the games, it doesn't have the same form factor in the later years. It's like that your friends don't have it, so you can't play online. There are lots of differentiation. It's not like a bank or insurance company where everybody's competing in a commoditized way, so brand really matters. Two thoughts. I think Nintendo does have brand power, but I think it is the weakest of the seven that it has. It's just incredible. I think it has all seven. The brand power I think is a smaller piece of the story, its brand power around the seal of quality, and especially with parents. In this era, if I buy my kids a Nintendo system, I can be very sure that there's not going to be excessive blood and guts, there's not going to be sexual content, and there's not going to be profanity. I think that's definitely branding because the Genesis brand is against that. That's true. They counter position there. I guess the reason I bring it up is because it never actually comes down to branding, because there are so few competitors that they differentiate in all ways that they don't actually need to rely on branding. You could argue maybe in the modern era, the Xbox versus PlayStation war is actually more of a branding power for one versus the other of why you would pick since they're less differentiated. But Nintendo's wildly differentiated in the IP that is on their platforms and nowhere else.…

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