Former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime has taken a job at GameStop.
Retirement must be going well.
Of course, Reggie won’t be stacking shelves or dealing with trade-ins.
In April he’ll be joining GameStop’s board of directors, in a move that’s vaguely akin
to boarding a sinking ship that’s currently being throttled by the kraken.
Many people have wondered why Reggie would do this to himself.
Moving from Nintendo of America to Gamestop doesn’t feel like a smart career move.
This is a company which closed 200 stores at the end of 2019 while making a tremendous
loss for the year.
Looking at Reggie’s career up to this point, though, it’s clear that Gamestop is exactly
the kind of company he loves working for.
Fixing a bad situation like this is the kind of challenge he relishes.
As we covered in our biography video on Reggie from last year, the former President of Nintendo
of America is the son of Cuban immigrants.
Reggie’s parents were star-crossed lovers, on opposite sides of a civil war, so they
ran away to America to start a new life together.
That’s not relevant to anything else in this video; it’s just a really cool story.
Reggie has made a career out of smart marketing moves and savvy business tactics.
In 2001, he joined VH1, a TV station which was suffering from turbulent ratings and which
was in dire straits.
When asked at the time why he would want to work for a failing TV channel, Reggie said:
“great brand…great industry – what more could you ask for?”
At the time, Reggie described himself as a “brand builder”, and he set about proving
that reputation.
The goal with VH1 was to move away from an aging Baby Boomer audience to try and appeal
to Generation X. Yes, that’s right: Reggie saved VH1 by effectively
saying “Okay Boomer”.
That actually happened.
It also paid off – by 2003, VH1 had cemented its brand focus on a younger audience, enjoying
a 100% increase in viewers aged 18 to 49.
From there, Reggie went to work for another ailing company that was suffering a branding
crisis: Nintendo.
I can already tell that the comments for this video are going to be interesting…
In 2003, Reggie joined Nintendo of America as their executive vice president of sales
and marketing.
The company was not exactly on fire at the time.
The N64 had been outsold by the Sony PlayStation, and the GameCube had been outsold by the PlayStation
2.
Internally, Nintendo of America was panicking about how their brand should be represented.
Many of their core audience had grown older and were more interested in the edgier, grungy
games that epitomized the mid 2000s.
Nintendo worried that their family-friendly branding was holding the company back.
When Reggie came onto the scene, the self-described brand builder had to fight hard to stop Nintendo
from chasing trends.
He said: “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 pushed Nintendo of America to go the other way with its branding.
Instead of catering specifically to the whims of angsty teenage boys, he pushed for the
company to be more inclusive, appealing to women, families, and basically anyone who
would be alienated by the games industry’s desire to be edgy and serious.
Said Reggie: “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.”
Much of what we all think of as Nintendo today is based on Reggie’s early work with the
brand.
He stopped the company from essentially pulling a Sega and chasing pop-culture trends that
would look embarrassingly dated a few years down the line.
Long story short, if there’s one thing Reggie loves, it’s revitalizing a dying brand.
Following his retirement from Nintendo last year, Reggie hasn’t exactly been sipping
cocktails on a beach.
He clearly wants an active retirement – hence his appointment as Leader in Residence at
Cornell University.
Joining GameStop gives Reggie the chance to do what he loves: save a dying company by
helping it to build a strong sense of community with its customers.
Following the announcement of his appointment, he said on Twitter:
“The gaming industry needs a healthy and vibrant @GameStop.
I look forward to being a part of @GameStopCorp Board and helping to make this happen.”
Now, Reggie is only on GameStop’s Board of Directors, so it’s difficult to say how
much he’ll actually be involved with attempts to turn the company around.
Still, it won’t be a surprise at all if he manages to pull it off.