This is another passion project on here because I distinctly remember coming up with this topic a manner of seconds. At that point in time, I was saving up money from my part time jobs in order to buy a Nintendo Switch so it only made sense to do my SWOT analysis presentation on Nintendo. This project fits well into this goal because in order to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to Nintendo, I had to research all facets of the organization. This encompasses all departments in the company like management, marketing, accounting, finance, and technology.
As a gaming company, marketing and technology are probably the two biggest factors in play for the company's success. This is because in order to attract gamers to buy your console, you must be able to show that your console has better or more novel technologies. However, all these bells and whistles will mean nothing if nobody knows about it or is interested in it and that is where the marketing team steps in.
The presentation shows how while Nintendo is behind in terms of graphics and memory, it makes up for it by marketing itself as a more multiplayer/family oriented console and thus, capturing more of the casual gamer market in comparison to other consoles like Sony's Playstation or Microsoft's Xbox. Ultimately, the presentation showed how Nintendo could leverage it strengths too boost its market share, some of the weaknesses that they will hopefully address, opportunities that they need to cash in on, and finally threats to their company's position.
For this presentation, my class was told to pitch and idea or product to the class. I decided to pitch the idea of gastrodiplomacy which is the usage of food to promote a country's culture and increase its soft power. I wanted to convince my class that investing in gastrodiplomacy was a worthwhile investment for any country regardless of its size.
In order to do so, I set about researching gastrodiplomacy programs around the world and picked two to present to the class. I chose Thailand and S. Korea because Thailand was the pioneer of gastrodiplomacy and ultimate popularized the practice while S. Korea has also experienced a significant increase in tourism from the implementation of this form of diplomacy. They are also both small countries which is a testament to the viability of the program too other countries.
This project suits this goal because in researching this topic I often had to see how governments had to manage and market these programs to other countries. They also had to perform budgeting and allocate funds to the program. In the end, they also had to quantify the success of these programs by cooperating with other ministries like tourism.