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Originally posted by: hudsonhawk
...consoles became like sports teams for a lot of people, and sales are the stats by which such people decide whether or not their "team" won.
This reminds me, I used to live near Virginia Tech, and their mascot was a turkey. And everyone stood up and did the hokey-pokey at half-time.
What I'm getting at is, there's just no way to predict what people will latch onto. You make the assumption, Smash_Brother, that people will feel a certain way about the name because of your intitial bad reaction to it. Who's to say the name will make people feel insecure? What specific connotations does it have? The GameCube was purple - purple is directly associated with women, g
ays, obnoxious dinosaurs, etc.
...What about Wii? People have made the case that it makes the console sound tiku tiku tiku! - when actually, the only thing it sounds like a kid's slang word. This may not seem like a big difference, but as I pointed out earlier, what american teenager is going to risk sounding childish himself by latching onto the fact that the name sounds like a children's word, especially when the name is also sounds like the more common 'we'? Teenagers don't make wee-wee jokes, they make sex jokes.
People may dismiss the name, and think it's stupid, at first. But soon it'll be a normal part of everyone's lexicon, and no one will think it's stupid, or consider not buying the console because of the name. And when that happens, that's when the marketing potential kicks in: now you have a name that can make for cool taglines in commercials, that seperates you from the competiton on the shelf, and that makes it easier for non-gamers to remember your name when they hear it. (You made a point about how single syllable names are harder to remember - not sure where that comes from. I, at least, think it's easier to remember 'bass' than it is to remember 'humuhumunukunukuapuaa'.)
Topic: EDITORIALS: Wii Will Get Over It, Won’t Wii? (Read 53017 times)
