Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

You will remember this recent story where I pointed out the necessity of local marketing  giving the example of Leamington and the eight video game development companies there and how invisible they are. An immediate reaction was that a reader of this blog modified the Wikipedia entry for Leamington Spa to more accurately reflect reality.

I decided to follow my own advice and sent the article to all the local games companies, all the local journalists and to all relevant politicians both local and national. As always with such things this largely fell on deaf ears. The press just ignored it (so far). Three game companies replied, Paul Ranson from Slam Productions, Peter Williamson from Supersonic Software and both Philip and Andrew Oliver at Blitz Games. A few of the politicians replied but only one, Bill Gifford, proposed any action.

Bill Gifford is both a Leamington Town Councillor and a Warwick District Councillor and has been in local government since 1995. He wrote to me asking if we could put some sort of event together that could promote Leamington and the Games Industry. Action! So I proposed an initial meeting which Blitz Games were kind enough to host.

In the meeting we were able to get a lot over about the nature of the industry, it’s role and contributions to the local community, it’s future and it’s problems. Councillor Gifford said he would work to get the Leamington town website updated to reflect the presence of the gaming industry. But more than that we now have a politician of some power and influence who knows what he is talking about when it comes to games. Philip Oliver gave us a tour of Blitz which was very impressive for Councillor Gifford, as seeing a development team at work for the first time always is. Even to me, having seen a lot of this over the years, the Blitz set up is massively impressive and they obviously have a lot of good staff there.

This is not the end of it. We now have a relationship. There will be further meetings, hopefully bringing in some of the other developers and interested parties in the area. And hopefully finding ways that the industry and the politicians can help each other with their respective agendas.

So, marketeers out there, reach out to your local community. It is not difficult and you may be surprised just how much everyone can benefit.

Any game industry marketeer is accustomed to thinking at least nationally and often globally. So it may seem strange to pay attention to the local press and politicians, yet it is essential to do so. Having the right local image can help in hundreds of ways and prevent harm in more hundreds of ways. Because it is the local community in which the company sits and does it’s business. And it is where many staff live.

Now that gaming is increasingly mainstream it is easy to work local perceptions to your advantage. And if you are part of a cluster of gaming companies in one locality you can work together for your mutual advantage.

Leamington Spa in Warwickshire is a town built on the Victorian belief in the medical properties of mineral spring water. After that it became a manufacturing centre in support of the vehicle manufacturing industry. And now it is a game industry centre with Blitz Games, bigBig Studios, FreeStyle Games, Supersonic Software, Slam Productions and Aqua Pacific. Very close to Leamington are Codemasters, CustomPlay Games and fishinabottle. This is a sizable presence and makes a major contribution to the local life and economy. A lot of highly paid gaming professionals live in Leamington.

When I worked at Codemasters I entertained both local MPs, James Plaskitt and John Maples and kept all the local press on our press release list. Now that gaming has become more mainstream and Leamington has become even more of a centre there is room for creating a far higher level of local awareness of the industry.

Yet most people who live in Leamington do not realise what is there. They are living in a world class cultural centre for gaming and they don’t know it. The town websites don’t mention gaming and neither does Wikipedia! This is a failure by all those gaming companies which would take very little to correct, to their mutual advantage.

What applies in Leamington applies to a huge number of localities world wide. The upside of bolting down your local image is great compared with the amount of effort involved.

Logos are great, a small piece of visual shorthand that represents something much bigger. A brand, a product, a service. Our lives are full of them and we each have hundreds, maybe thousands that we instantly recognise and which have complex meanings for us. Ferrari’s prancing horse, Coca Cola, Apple, Google, Intel, Marlboro, McDonald’s, Dell, Kellogg’s, MTV, Shell and so many more are recognised by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

You can pay a lot of money for a logo. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in branding exercises that sometimes end in failure. At a more normal, everyday, level an artist or marketing agency will basically charge what they can get away with. Sometimes, when you are buying print, web design or advertising, the logo comes for “free”.

But it is not the price that matters. It is the image. There are so many logos around that many now look like each other which destroys the whole point. Even very major organisations can end up with nondescript images to represent themselves. For this reason I have always preferred text based logos that spell out the brand name. You need to be a very big brand indeed, like say Mercedes Benz with their three pointed star, to get away with anything else.

And now, just like everything else, branding has met the internet. And like everything else it has driven down price and driven up convenience. So now we have services like 25 Pound Logo who I have just used to create a logo for the Harbury Villagebuzz website. There are similar services in America, but the geographical location is irrelevant.

Although these prices are cheap the service certainly isn’t. You create a brief and they very rapidly send you a selection of rough ideas. You can pick from these and/or revise an unlimited number of times. The logos are unique and original created by real artists and are not just clipart or templates. The service is just as good, or possibly better, as going to a fancy expensive branding company. For Villagebuzz I went through two sets of submissions to get what I wanted which was then made into finished artwork, all in just a few days.

At this price you can create useful logos for all sorts of things that you maybe wouldn’t have bothered with before: for a company department or studio, within a game, to represent a concept or idea, for a building or even a room within a building and so on. The possibilities are endless. You can certainly go and have some fun with this!

So to our second set of factors, this time there are 9 to make a total of 17. Feel free to add any more you can think of in the comments.

Finally all you have to do is to repeat all 17 factors for every market you sell the game in.

Jagex are the publisher of the very popular MMO Runescape which is mainly played by kids. A feature of the game is catching sharks. Yet out there in the real world sharks are being fished to extinction. They are fished mainly in an especially cruel way where their fins (the valuable bit) are cut off and then they are thrown back into the sea to die slowly, which can take weeks. So Runescape is sending out all the wrong messages to it’s vast player base.

Sharks are now more endangered than whales. Yet ecologically they are far more important. It is the sharks that keep the oceans healthy by removing all that is diseased or otherwise unhealthy. So by featuring shark fishing in this game Jagex are putting themselves firmly on the side of the bad guys.

So this gives them a great marketing opportunity. They can take the sharks out of the game (and anything else that is endangered) and replace them with something that is sustainable. They could do this in “consultancy” with a high profile environmental organisation like Greenpeace. Then use a good PR company to place the story. This should get on national TV news in several countries. The coverage would be massive.

So many millions of people who are currently unaware of Runescape would be informed about it, this in itself would be excellent. But in addition the brand image would be considerably enhanced. And maybe it might do something to help the sharks.

If anyone is interested in registering their opposition to shark fishing there is a petition here.

You should never market two games in the same way, to do so is to totally misunderstand what you are doing. Each game is an individual that needs loving care. And so should be nurtured in it’s own special way. Only by doing this will you realise the full potential of that game in the market. This is what the people who have developed the game and those who have invested in it deserve.

So let’s  look at the first 8 criteria you look at when formulating your marketing plans for a game:

• Genre. We live in the age of the me too alien shooting game. But customers still play many different genres. These customers will have different demographics but importantly they will have a different emotional engagement with the game. Tetris engages but not in the same way as World of Warcraft.
• How good the game is. Obvious really. If it is excellent you rub it in every-one’s faces marketing wise and thank development for giving you an easy life. If the game is less good you have to work for your wages. But don’t give up hope and abandon it, you are a marketing professional so must still do your best.
• Content. Obvious and yet not so obvious. You would market a game set in Paris differently to a game set in New York. Some marketing people don’t really know the content of the game that they are marketing. Don’t make this mistake. Violence, sex, race, political and religious issues can work for you or against you. It is up to your skill as a marketeer.
• The time of year. Game sales follow a seasonal curve. Unfortunately games releases follow a similar curve. Christmas is for blockbusters, anything else gets lost and we don’t yet have the tradition of a summer holiday hit, like the film industry does. Other than that every season has it’s benefits and downsides. My favourites would be about three weeks before the clocks change in the spring and a week after they change in the autumn. Leisure behaviour changes radically at these two times.
• Price-point. Again seemingly obvious. But remember that sometimes you will sell more at a higher price, because people will think that it must be better. Console games are generally overpriced as a result of the current business model so the attach rate is quite low. This means that you have to make every purchase very special indeed. Make the customer glad that they opened their wallet.
• What the competitors are up to in general (Sega Rally was launched against Halo 3!). Blockbuster suck the market dry. They may bring more people into the stores but those people are only there for one purpose. Looking at competitor release schedules may help you make a one week change that significantly increases sales.
• What competitors are up to in your genre. Customers are not going to buy two racing games in quick succession, or two shooters or even two platform games. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones never released against each other, follow their example.
• USPs of that game. This is incredibly important. You may not even know what they are until you lever the knowledge out of development. Once I marketed the first game in which motion capture and Dolby surround sound recording were done simultaneously. The press loved that when I told them.

To be continued next Wednesday with 9 more success factors in game marketing.

I have been there far too many times. When the marketing pie for a game is sliced up. So much for print, so much for point of sale, so much for online and so on. The division of the money owes nothing to science (or even art) and owes just about everything to politics. Of course the result is that marketing departments often deliver horrendous value for money. But nobody seems to mind.

As a rule of thumb (and ignoring games that are extremely good or extremely bad) 50% of the sales success of a game is down to the marketing department. And 50% is down to the game itself. So it would only be fair if the spend was split equally between the two. This is where small publishers are at a huge disadvantage, there is no way that they can spend anywhere near as much on marketing as they do on development. Big publishers have a powerful global reach and so can afford, if they want to, to spend far more on marketing a game than making it.

At Codemasters the greatest marketing success we had was when the company was in dire straits. Piracy destroyed the PSX market in just a few months and suddenly we had no income. A lot of people lost their jobs because there was no longer enough money to pay them. And we had to market Operation Flashpoint with a budget that was close to zero. So there was no pie to be sliced.

What we did was to engage with our potential customer base using PR and online and especially community. The driver was the monthly press release. This was then used as the core of the monthly email newsletter and as the focus for online discussion. We gradually built an online following that became like a snowball rolling down a mountain. So that at launch Operation Flashpoint was the number one PC game  in every market with a chart. A global success.

In fact having a big budget for marketing usually leads to far less value for money. The marketing department feel that they have to burn through the money. So they do really silly and expensive things like TV advertising campaigns for gamer’s games. The waste of money is horrendous.

If you market every game the same or just using the obvious tools out of the marketing mix your campaign will just disappear amongst all the other campaigns doing the same thing. So you need to spend more and you have to be on top of your game with everything you do just not to get buried. Whereas if you do something different you will get noticed and get far more marketing exposure for a fraction of the spend.

Richard Branson understands this. When building Virgin Atlantic airline he pulled off a series of high profile stunts with speedboats and balloons across the Atlantic. He spent a fraction of the marketing budget of competitors like British Airways yet got many times the marketing exposure.

In the game industry I have always been a fan of Larry Sparks (now VP Marketing at Square Enix) who has pulled a lot of excellent game promoting stunts. One time he got a group of people to change their name by deed poll to that of an upcoming game. This got the game a huge amount of coverage and cost very little indeed. We need far more of this in the games industry. The games are fun and the marketing should be too.