• by Amy Corr  @MediaPostOTL, January 1, 2004

It's no secret that the video gaming audience is one desirable demographic. Not only are gamers hard to reach, they are also a dreamy target audience. (Can I get some 18-24 year old males, please?) Who better to realize the power of this audience than the video game companies themselves?

Nintendo.com, with help from CRM/IT Company Blast Radius, teamed up to design a customer loyalty program for Nintendo of America's faithful fan base. People of any age can sign up, with children under the age of 13 needing their parent's permission to participate. To date, a wide range of ages have signed up, but the majority are between 16 and 24.

The three-tiered program encourages gamers to become registered "My Nintendo" members of Nintendo.com. Members must enter their name, address and e-mail address, and are given the option to receive email newsletters from Nintendo and join its online forums (message boards, chatting, etc.). Signing up gives users access to tier one.

For a tier one member to advance to tier 2 (a.k.a. "Nsider"), members must register at least one Nintendo product (a new feature added to the revamped site) to access exclusive content and other information online. An incentive for gamers to become a tier 2 member is Nintendo's latest promotion for the Legend of Zelda's Collector's Edition disk. Members that register two games will receive this disk for free. This promotion ends in January.

Gary Stuart, vice president of client strategy at Blast Radius, said the goal of the site update in June 2003 was to "usher the brand online into a new age. Before the redesign, customer loyalty was always in the background. For the redesign, we took the gamer's voice and projected it online."

Once a gamer is a tier 2 member, each time they log in, their activities are tracked (taking surveys, registering products, posting comments in forums, etc.) and compiled, helping gamers reach the third level of membership. By tracking gamers' activities, Nintendo, in an automated format, can then nominate certain gamers to the third and final level of membership called Sage.

Sage level members are the "ultimate" group of people that receive premium content, help moderate forums and are sometimes given the opportunity to preview new Nintendo games. Sage members even have their own forum, and only fellow Sage members can read their forum posts.

According to Dan Owsen, Nintendo of America's online manager, there were a few reasons why the customer loyalty program was developed.

"We have some very loyal fans, and we wanted to harness some of that fan energy on Nintendo.com. To that end, we added the loyalty program to reward those who really get involved with Nintendo, and we added a robust community on the site to give fans an outlet to talk about their love of Nintendo. Second, we wanted to find out more about our fans. The loyalty program will help us gain valuable marketing data about our consumers by incenting them to participate on the site. We plan to use this actionable intelligence to inform our future online marketing efforts, as well as possibly our game development plans."

Owsen also hopes that the Sages will offer Nintendo insight on what gamers are looking for from not only Nintendo, but their games as well.

"The feedback we're getting from this program has been outstanding so far. We've already been able to identify a good core group to be our first Sages. Sages are the most dedicated fans and we hope these online influencers will share their love of Nintendo with other members of our online community, as well as give us good suggestions that could influence our future product promotions or even game development."

And what will all the collected data be used for? Owsen has a few ideas in mind. "The data will be used for a variety of purposes, primarily to gain a more complete picture of our consumer base. We'll also look at trends in game category preferences, and other demographic information. In addition, we'll use the data that we collect to identify the most loyal customers and think of ways to reach out to those customers in special ways."