Cliches! Cliches! Cliches!
What is a Core Market?
It is your current market.
What is an Expanded Market?
It is the market you are expanding.
Want an example of this in action? Think of news agencies. The Core Market for news was newspapers. The Expanded Market was the Internet. For a while, Core Market and Expanded Market existed side by side. But now that Core Market is collapsing. Unfortunately, many news agencies did not expand fast enough before their core collapsed.
The Core Market for the NES was games like Donkey Kong and various arcade games. That was the Core Market.
The Expanded Market for the NES would be games like Legend of Zelda which brought more sophisticated gamers to the system. If you look at NES history, the early games were just arcade ports.
With the Wii, the Core Market were Gamecube type games. The Expanded Market would be games like Wii Sports or Super Mario Brothers 5.
With Wii U, the Core Market is Wii Sports and Super Mario Brothers 5 type gamers. That is now Nintendo’s traditional audience. The Wii U Expanded Market would be something like Modern Warfare 3. We all know that market is not represented on Nintendo’s system.
Core Market does not mean ‘hardcore’.
Expanded Market does not mean ‘casual’.
It is frightening to see Nintendo become illiterate in the business jargon they profess to subscribe. If you can’t get the jargon right, it is going to end very badly.
