Former Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aime Saved Nintendo From Making a Big Mistake

In the gaming space, there's not many logos more iconic than the Nintendo Logo, with its white [...]

In the gaming space, there's not many logos more iconic than the Nintendo Logo, with its white text, oval outline, and refulgent red background. Alongside the equally nostalgic PlayStation Logo, the Nintendo logo has been the most recognizable logo in gaming for decades. It's literally every marketing team's dream. That said, for some inexplicable reason, Nintendo almost changed it, and would have if it wasn't for the former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, one of the most popular video game executives of all time.

According to Fils-Aime, when he first joined the Japanese games maker, the company was looking to move away from it's current logo as part of a larger initiative to distance itself from its kid-friendly image. Thankfully, the former Nintendo president put a stop to this nonsense, and convinced the company the way to achieve this was by broadening its content rather than make changes to the company's core identity.

"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," said Fils-Aime while speaking to Present Value Podcast. "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."

Reggie continued:

"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."

Of course, making drastic changes to the company logo would have probably ended poorly for Nintendo. While companies successfully revise logos all the time, the video game industry treks in nostalgia much more than other industries.

Anyway, as always, feel free to leave a comment or 47 letting us know what you think. Do you like Nintendo's logo or should it try something new?

H/T, Nintendo.

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