Rating: 7.5/10.
Memoir by Reggie Fils-Aimé, the chief operating officer and a marketing executive of Nintendo in the Americas during the early 2000s and 2010s, and this journey up to the position as well as what he did for the company. He was raised in New York to a Haitian immigrant family in a crime-ridden neighborhood. He gets into Cornell and lands his first job at P&G where he learns various lessons, like how to convince others of an initiative. Throughout his career, he pushed for aggressive and unconventional marketing tactics that often worked but confused people or made them uncomfortable, and he learned to get buy-in from others to execute.
After his first job, he worked on marketing for various different companies, including Pizza Hut, Panda Express, Guinness, and Derby. He spends a relatively short amount of time at each one and manages things like menu changes, opening restaurants, beer festivals, and coordinating media coverage after 9/11. However, often his vision was seen as too ambitious relative to what was feasible in the economic reality. Eventually, he ended up at Nintendo, which at that time was struggling in the console market against Sony PlayStation and Microsoft and was facing rising competition in the handheld market.
When he joins Nintendo, Nintendo DS was beginning to launch. He debuted at the E3 conference with a much more aggressive attitude than was typical for the Japanese company and challenged traditional norms, becoming an instant hit among gamers. In his role, he manages to convince the senior executive team to do more unconventional things like targeting women and older gamers, and enacted incentives for retailer support and giving away demo games, backing up his ideas with data and evidence. Sometimes adaptations needed to be made for Western audiences that he would manage, and he challenged some of the ideas from higher-ups like Mr. Iwata (CEO of Nintendo), that he thought wouldn’t work.
Some of the launches were less successful, like the 3DS initially had weaker sales than expected, and this meant executing a plan to cut the price quickly in the next few months to prevent refunds from retailers while making sure that loyal gamers who bought it at the start didn’t feel ripped off. Many choices were controversial, like bundling Wii Sports, which Shigeru Miyamoto thought deserved to be its own game and should not be given away for free. He witnessed the failed launch of the Wii U, which suffered from a lack of strong games during launch, various marketing challenges, and technical difficulties. These lessons were brought to the Switch, which had a much more successful launch.
He retired in 2019; after retirement, he continued to advise the board of various gaming companies like GameStop. Overall this book is a quick run-through of many decisions made at the marketing and operations level of a large gaming company to understand some of the challenges in internationalizing a Japanese brand; it is mostly narrative and doesn’t go into much specific analysis but is still a light and fun read.
