Brand management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Brand management - Essay Example At the present, the handheld market does not even have one of the main competitors, Microsoft, as anything more than a blip on the radar (Dalrymple, 2010). Prior to the release of the IPhone and IPod Touch, the market share had the DS beating out the Playstation Portable by several times the number of units sold (Wilson, 2007). More recently, the score has shifted thusly: The DS has 40 million units worldwide and the PSP 25 million (Wilson, 2007). The IPhone hasn't broken extensively out of the European and American markets, while the DS has the advantage of being found all over the globe (Stang et al, 2007; Wilcox, 2009). The iPhone has been basically marketed exclusively at the US, instead of emerging market like Russia and India, despite Apple's ballyhoo: â€Å"Emerging markets and Apple's flawed strategy in India and Russia top my reasons for questioning how high the platform will ascend before falling back to earth...The 70+ countries is something that looks good on paper, but in terms of volume it doesn't address the regional dynamics. One of the reasons why Nokia and Samsung are so good in developing markets is because they have mastered the art of effective manufacturing and distribution. They can make devices/services that suit the market† (Wilcox, 2009). Thus, though hard global data is difficult to find, it's clear that the global distribution is more like 2008 than 2010 above, with the IPhone being the third player. The takeaway story from the handheld market is this: Nintendo leads the most lucrative market by anywhere from close to a two-to-one to a three-to-one ratio against its competitors. Apple is moving up, but will likely not overtake the behemoth. Apple took 9% of its near market share from the PSP and 5% from the DS, meaning that the fight can be more meaningfully described as a battle for second place. Sony is also announcing a new second-generation PSP (Brown, 2011). The new Nintendo 3DS has many titles in the Japanese top ten, sh owing good penetration (Jenkins, 2011). This seems to suggest that Apple will have a brutal fight for second place, dealing with a new PSP challenger, while neither will be able to challenge Nintendo's entrenched advantage stemming from being the only handheld challenger to stay in the game from the Game Boy to the GBA to the SP to the DS. Also note that, in the handheld market, it is proper to include any other cell phone, which typically have games like Bejeweled or Tetris available for them, with the cell-phone gaming industry being an oft-ignored but serious source of gaming hours. In any respect, it is important when analyzing the success of the major three consoles to bear some lessons in mind: 1. Nintendo's success with the Wii is complimented as a â€Å"one-two punch† with the DS (Wilson, 2007). The DS has sold more than the three non-portable consoles combined. 2. Sony is being beaten by a large margin in the handheld market. Even if they were to do substantially bet ter near the end of this generation's life in their Playstation 3 offerings, such as with the announcement of the Move, they would still be behind in a major arena. 3. Microsoft is not even a competitor in the handheld m