2. Even When They Buy the Software, They Don’t Know How to Play It

Hatano - I often go out shopping, and you know, there are stores that sell all kinds of things, not just games. And I think those that are the easiest to understand are vegetable stores. Nobody confuses a reddish with a carrot.

Iwata - Right. (laughs)

Hatano - Nobody confuses a pumpkin with watermelon. People might require something that’s fresh, but it would take a lot for someone to incorrectly pick the wrong product. You know if it’s a pumpkin, or watermelon, or carrot or raddish, but you don’t know on first glance like that with our products.

Iwata - Certainly, in the instance of games, they’re all in the same package, and they’re products that are hard to know the “taste” of until you play them.

Hatano - So I think first, you need to display them in an easy to understand manner, and then you need to clearly explain them - I think these 2 points are incredibly important. And so I also looked at book stores. I also looked at electronics stores. I started looking at all different kinds of stores, and felt that there were still some hard to understand things about game sales floors, from the customer’s perspective.

Iwata - So it strongly reinforced for you that game sales floors weren’t structured in a very customer-friendly way when checking out various other product’s sales environments.

Hatano - So I made a proposal - in order for us to feel ourselves just what it was that was confusing customers on the sales floors, why they were getting confused, Nintendo’s sales department employees should stand at the sales floors of retailers.

Iwata - You’re talking about the “Concierge Plan” that you brought up during the Sales HQ Meeting.

Hatano - Yes. For two months starting in March of 2008 we partnered up with retailers and had our sales employees participate on the floor at retailers and actually had them confront customers. By actually conversing with the customers one to one, we learned what was confusing them, what kind of knowledge they were bringing in shopping at the store, and what was the impetus for them to buy games. Afterwards we continued our study, cooperating with a third-party research company and asked them to concierge as well. By doing this we began to better understand the customer’s situation with higher precision.

Iwata - For instance what kind of things did you learn?

Hatano - For instance, there are customers who come to purchase software after seeing a TV ad. What we found was that even if the customer could clearly remember the ad, many couldn’t remember the name of the product. So at the store they’d ask the clerk for the game that features such and such celebrity…

Iwata - If the clerk is well versed in commercials that’s fine, but if not there’s absolutely no way to figure out what software they’re talking about.

Hatano - Exactly. What was worse, we’d have cases where customers who would get recommendations from friends “because it’s fun”, so they’d decide to try it, but they couldn’t remember the title at all.

Iwata - If a clerk is asked “Like, I want… that kind of software”, there’s no way to search for it. And since more product came out that made it even harder. For instance, if they’re asked “I’d like English software”, well there’s 10 or 20 different titles, so they have no idea which one the customer wants among those.

Hatano - Exactly. I felt like that kind of confusion was getting more and more prevalent. To give an even more extreme example, one customer who had bought “Brain Training” for the first time went home, and when they went to open it “this small thing came out of the package”.

Iwata - Of course, the game would be in the package.

Hatano - But this customer didn’t have the hardware.

Iwata - Ahhhh…

Hatano - So it was, “how do I play this?”

Iwata - This customer wasn’t aware that they needed to buy the hardware.

Hatano - Precisely. But we feel that those types of customers are also important.

Iwata - “Expanding the Game Population” brought about new kinds of customers that we never could have even dreamed of.

Takeuchi - There’s actually an even more extreme example.

Iwata - Takeuchi-san, during the Concierge period you collected a massive amount of data, didn’t you?

Takeuchi - Yes, every week we had about 300 comments come in, and reading those, there were some really big surprises. For instance, customers who would buy DS software and then ask “how do you put this in the DS?”

Iwata - What?

Takeuchi - The package is huge, right? It seems that they had trouble because that whole package couldn’t possibly fit in the DS.

Iwata - WHAT?!

Takeuchi - Apparently a parent in their 50’s and their child in their 20’s had this experience. At that point, over 23 million DSes had been sold, so all kinds of people had one, but even then…

Iwata - So it’s actually incredibly arrogant of us to think that, just because the DS has become so prevalent that it would be common knowledge to know how to use one.

Takeuchi - I’d say so. So after tallying up all of the concierge information we learned that the actual percentage of customers who actually knew the names of the product and actually had an idea of what the game content was, was only about 10 percent, and almost half of customers knew nothing at all.

Iwata - We were only able to deploy concierges to about 30 stores across the country, so in actuality there must be a lot of customers at all of the massive number of other stores that were never able to find the product they wanted.

Takeuchi - Indeed, so I felt that this was more dire than we realized.

Hatano - In order to deal with the fact that those kinds of customers have increased it would obviously be necessary to acquire the cooperation of the retailers. And I felt strongly that it would be imperative that we properly follow up.

Takeuchi - At that point I felt that it was important to rethink things from the ground up, so I decided we should create pamphlets: “To First-Time DS Users.” and “To First-Time Wii Users.”

Iwata - Those wide pamphlets placed at retailers.

Takeuchi - When you open the “To First-Time Wii Users” pamphlet, on the first page it starts with “What is Wii?” and on the next page, on the right, it says “A game player that you connect to the TV and insert games for playing.” For us that’s just common sense, but we realized through the concierge data that such pamphlets were needed at retailers.

Iwata - People who are in the game industry can take for granted that the things they consider common sense may not be. So it seems having assumed that there must be some customers who are having problems, once you went to retailers and researched yourselves you found that the root of the problem was even deeper than you feared, and were made aware that certain things had to be properly relayed and taught to people.

Takeuchi - Yes, we were made aware of that.