Reggie Fils-Aime Stopped Nintendo From Changing Their Logo To Appeal To Older Audiences

Last month, Reggie Fils-Aime had an interview with Present Value Podcast where he discussed his time as the President of Nintendo America, including some interesting stories from behind the scenes.

One of these stories was about how Nintendo of America tried to change the company’s iconic logo in order to appeal to a different, more “adult” demographic. Although this seemed like a good idea to in order to shed the stigma of being “kiddy”, Reggie didn’t see it that way, and sought to find ways for Nintendo to broaden its appeal while staying true to what the brand stood for.

From a branding standpoint, we had to be clear in what Nintendo as a brand stood for, as well as what the individual franchises stood for. I’ll give you an example.

When I joined Nintendo, there was a sense of almost shame that Nintendo appealed to young consumers, and the marketing team at Nintendo of America started doing things with the logo – that classic Nintendo logo in an oval – they would put it into graffiti style, or they’d do different things to try and age up the logo, and I put a stop to that because that is not our brand. And what we needed to do was yes, appeal to a broad swatch of consumers, but we needed to do it based on what the brand stood for, and not doing it in some false way.

Systemically, we went through and cleaned up the presentation of the brand, but we also created messaging coupled with content that really broadened the reach, broadened the appeal, and set the stage for all of the great products we would launch like Wii, like Wii Fit, and eventually the Nintendo Switch.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.