Reggie stopped Nintendo of America from trying to age up the logo after joining the company

Reggie Fils-Aime recently appeared on the Present Value podcast. The former Nintendo of America president discussed his time at the Big N in-depth, and at one point, was asked about what companies need to think about when building a brand.

Reggie spoke about Nintendo becoming a powerhouse in the gaming industry and how it was a team effort – specifically a “high-functioning, strong leadership team that disagreed in private but was aligned in public and drove the business forward.” He also discussed an experience he had in which Nintendo of America was taking the company’s well-known logo in different directions to try and appeal to an older demographic. This is when he was first starting out. However, Reggie realized that in order to appeal to a mainstream audience, they needed “to do it based on what the brand stood for, and not doing it in some false way.”

Reggie’s full words:

“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.”