I know what actual "brand management" is: the strategy a company uses to market its products, hopefully in a cohesive way that resonates with consumers and gives them buying cues and quality indicators. "Bad brand management" would be doing that poorly.
And... that's exactly what I meant. Square-Enix has adopted increasingly baroque naming systems for its games, put out an increasing number of spinoffs whose quality and content is obscure to the audience until after their release, built up sub-brands (Crystal Chronicles, 4WoL, etc.) only to drop them or repurpose them to new and less desirable purposes, and otherwise created confusion and dissatisfaction around a label ("Final Fantasy") that at one time stood for quality and desirability. They have a brand; they used it suboptimally, in a way that ablated its utility in the process of achieving fairly meager gains; that brand is now tarnished. Bad brand management.
Again, I really don't think any my original assertions here should be controversial. The interwoven problems of poor marketing presentation, excessive spinoff quantity, and sliding product quality across the board have been discussed at length here on GAF for years; we were talking about this stuff back in 2007, when FFIV DS wildly underperformed its predecessor, and Sales-Age has watched as the effect has grown stronger and stronger, with a series of notable underperforming titles and finally XIII-2's unprecedented collapse. This stuff
also all got hashed out in the last ten or so "why is FF such a disaster? can SE save it?" threads we had. The decline of the brand has been documented pretty extensively, such that the state it's in today can't really be a surprise to anyone who's been following it closely.
I'm willing to believe that handheld spin-off sales aren't what they once were, but I don't know that it's at all meaningful in the discussion of the main series.
It isn't
necessarily, but it's a leading indicator. There was a time when the brand name "Final Fantasy" was so strong in all three territories that puting it on
any game guaranteed immense sales, and even what in retrospect were rather trifling titles (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, anyone?) drew fairly extensive buzz and reasonably impressive sales. When FF spinoffs became more plentiful, with more poor entries and misleadingly presented or poorly-thought-out titles, the sales on these spinoffs trended downward pretty significantly, to the point where FF-themed titles started actively underperforming expectations and sometimes outright bombing.
When this trend really kicked in (it was definitely happening in 2007, and got worse from there) there was quite a bit of speculation about how this sort of brand decline would affect the main series. My position at the time was a pretty strongly felt belief that as long as the quality of mainline entries remained high, it probably wouldn't.... but, well.
With respect to reception, I think we're reaching a point where consumers who still buy Final Fantasy games are insulated from the reviews they might read about them.
I think that's possible, but XIII-2's reception suggests that that audience is something like 300k people in the US these days -- a far cry from when X-2 did 1.5m in each territory.
Like, if FF has really shrank its US audience to the point where it's selling only to the niche of "JRPG fans" (rather than the semi-mainstream audience that previously buoyed these titles) that's an immense and probably unrecoverable loss.
"Collapse" is Guitar Hero.
If we assume XIII-2 has something to say about the overall brand strength (and given the way that X-2 sold at around 75% of a mainline entry, I very much think it does) we're looking at a franchise that could be facing a 50+% loss of sales from its current generational debut to whatever the next "main" title it can manage. I think that's well worthy of "collapse," myself.
This is not to say that these sales aren't a problem. But 1994-2001 was Square being in the right place at the right time, and Final Fantasy doesn't have to be that to be successful and make them lots of money, just like Sanrio doesn't need 50-year-old men buying Hello Kitty backpacks to make them lots of money.
I'm not really talking about the pretty much unavoidable decline of Final Fantasy from a 10m-ish worldwide seller in 1997 to a 5m-ish worldwide seller in 2006; what I'm interested in is the (IMO almost entirely avoidable) decline going on right now to what could wind up being a 1-2m worldwide seller.
