Better According to Whom?
2 November 2026There’s a natural tendency in business to look at what your competitors are doing and try to do it better.
If they offer more features, you add more. If they invest in new technology, you look at how you can do the same. It makes sense. Nobody wants to be left behind.
But what if you’re all trying to get better at something your customers don’t particularly care about?
In the mid-2000s, the video game industry was largely competing to build more powerful consoles, with better graphics and increasingly sophisticated games. Sony and Microsoft were investing heavily in these pursuits.
Nintendo took a different approach.
Instead of trying to build a better console for the people who already played video games, Nintendo wanted to reach people who didn’t play them at all, or those who had lost interest.
The president at the time, Satoru Iwata, recognised that increasingly complex games and controllers could be putting people off before they had started playing. So instead of asking how it could make games more impressive, Nintendo started asking a different question: how could it make them more accessible?
The answer was the Wii.
Its motion-sensitive controller allowed players to swing a virtual tennis racket, or play gold using movements they already understood. You didn’t have to spend ages learning complicated controls to enjoy Wii Sports.
You just had to pick up the controller and have a go.
It’s a relatively simple idea, but it challenged the industry’s assumptions about what a better gaming experience could be like.
Nintendo wasn’t trying to win the same competition in the same way as Sony and Microsoft. It was making the experience appealing to people who had largely been left out of it.
And it proved massively popular. The Wii became a huge commercial success, selling more than 100 million consoles worldwide over its lifetime.
Nintendo didn’t succeed by adding more of everything. It succeeded by understanding that a different group of customers valued different things.
For some players, cutting-edge graphics and complex gameplay did matter enormously. But for others, being able to simply pick up a controller with family or friends mattered much more.
It’s not that either group was wrong. They just wanted different things from the same product.
It’s easy to assume that progress means adding more, improving what you already do or matching what a competitor offers. But those things only create value if they matter to the people you’re trying to serve.
You might try to introduce a more sophisticated process, or add another service because that’s what others in the same industry are doing. And it might look like it makes the product more comprehensive or the service more involved.
But will customers appreciate the difference?
And what about the people who aren’t buying from you?
There may be people who would happily buy from you if things were made simpler.
That doesn’t mean every business needs to reinvent its offering or that following competitors is always a mistake. Sometimes improving what you already do is exactly the right thing.
The important part is always knowing why you’re doing it.
Nintendo’s success with the Wii came from questioning what the industry had come to regard as progress and by recognising that making games more powerful wasn’t the only way to make them better.
When you look at your products, your services and the way you work, are you improving them because that’s what your customers value, or because that’s what everyone else is doing?
Because better is only better if it matters to the person you’re selling to.
