What’s In A Mascot?
It’s interesting, when you look at the three big companies, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, only one of them has a definitive mascot. Mario is arguably the most recognizable name in video gaming, along side Link/The Legend of Zelda, yet another Nintendo franchise. The brand loyalty and instant recognition of these names is what really drives home Nintendo’s sales. People feel comfortable going out and buying a Mario game. It’s what they know, and in most cases, it’s what they grew up with. Mario has been at the forefront of gamer’s minds since the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 80s. Is the power of Nintendo’s mascot a true driving force in their success? And would Microsoft or Sony benefit from having a mascot as recognizable as the plumber himself?
Time and time again Nintendo has proven that most of their flagship products are long-term sellers. This means that instead of most sales happening in the first two weeks of a game's release, they expect to see constant numbers over the course of a year or two. However, most of Nintendo’s games that see sales patterns like this tend to be Mario titles. As previously mentioned, the words Nintendo and Mario almost feel like one and the same.
If you buy a new Nintendo system, whether it be the Wii or DS, your first instinct is to pick up the latest Mario title, banking on the fact that older games in the franchise were good. Even Reggie Fils-Aime, President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America, is so confident in Nintendo’s mascot that he believes that their latest release, New Super Mario Bros. Wii will outsell Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 by the end of the holiday season (January’s NPD numbers). This is a fairly bold statement when you look at the fact that Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.2 million copies on the 360 alone in November. Fils-Aime makes his statement “unequivocally”, showing that he truly must believe in the power of their mascot.
When looking at Microsoft and Sony, while neither have as definitive a mascot, most people frequently think of Master Chief while thinking of the 360 and its predecessor. However, Sony has no real mascot that instantly comes to mind when thinking about the Playstation brand. They have incredibly memorable characters from their first party games, such as Kratos from God of War or Nathan Drake from Uncharted, but these are both mascots created within the past 4 years. Old charmers like Spyro and Crash are still around today, but unfortunately their glory days seem to be behind them. The symbol most firmly associated with Playstation is its logo.
In 2008, Sony made a big push to make LittleBigPlanet and its cute and cuddly character, Sackboy, their mascot as a way of reaching out to the general public with a character who wasn’t soaked in blood. Before the launch of LittleBigPlanet, the game was being regarded as revolutionary and the project that would finally bridge the gap between casual and hardcore gamers on the PS3. Essentially, it was the product that gamers thought the rest of their family would like. After all, it had a cute and cuddly character, and it was a platformer, just like the original Super Mario Bros. Unfortunately, once the game launched, casual gamers found themselves overwhelmed by all of the creative abilities housed on the disc, and thus turned away from it. By the beginning of 2009, Sony was back onto Kratos and Nathan Drake.
It’s too bad that Sony gave up on Sackboy after only one release. Like almost everything, it takes time to establish a brand or mascot. Not only was LittleBigPlanet a brand new intellectual property, but Sony was also trying to launch its “protagonist” as their mascot. Nintendo didn’t originally set out to make Mario their mascot, it was the result of the public’s response. Back when the NES first launched the amount of games available was much smaller, and the fact that Super Mario Bros. was first-party developed helped to create the association of Mario and Nintendo as one entity.
One of our users, 1mpulse, had this to say: “Think about it this way, if Mario was invented now, he probably wouldn’t have the same impact. So much of it is nostalgia, and what we, as gamers, are used to.” Mario didn’t become Nintendo’s flagship product overnight, in fact Super Mario Bros. 2 didn’t originally come to North America, it was only after years of sequels and marketing campaigns that people really started to associate Mario as Nintendo’s mascot.
It’s interesting to look at each of the three console developers, and their different successes and failures. How much more popular would Sony be with the kind of brand loyalty Nintendo has? Where would Microsoft be with the amount of first-party games developed games that the PS3 gets? And the biggest question of all: where would Nintendo be without Mario? It’s scary to think, I imagine most people including myself have a hard time thinking of Nintendo without the existence of Mario. This just goes to show how important a mascot can be to building up brand loyalty and association.
It's easy to tell from the dominance of Xbox Live, the beauty of the PS3 and the phenomenon that is the Wii how each company does things differently. At the end of the day it’s what allows us to have such diversity in the games that we play. Even though Microsoft and Sony don’t have a definitive mascot, maybe that’s what creates the balance between all three companies and the games that they release.
