The Business of Manipulation

[Katana314]

I've always had this weird fascination with marketing. For one, you can sell something really well with effective marketing. Two, you stop buying bullshit products because you can see through their techniques.
Not all marketing is evil. Sometimes you genuinely DO want a certain product, but don't know it until it's been shown to you. What about Steam? "TF2 for $5! Come get it!" Would you prefer NOT to hear about that?

I'd love to hear more about this kind of thing, and what we can do to help gaming advertisement agencies get on track.

 

[Andronicus]

I kinda feel sorry for markerters of Sony products in Europe. It must be hard trying to make an incredible pile of stinking drivel look appealing to consumers, especially if they happen to be aware of the quality of Sony's products in other regions.

Anyways, great read, very interesting. I look forward to regular intallments of this column.

 

[The Philistine]

At least the gaming industry is typically dealing with an audience that is typically already actively looking at their product. While the advertising can sometimes be condescending or feel forced, at least you don't really deal with the slimey shlock that is convincing someone they have a "problem" they weren't aware of before.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

I think you need to make a distinction between marketing and advertising/spam

Any "commercial message" that annoys me and I can't avoid but still live a normal life is spam; billboards, direct mail, telemarketers, uce, blinky flashy noisy slows my computer down web advertisements, litter left in my windshield wiper, etc. It always was spam just email spam is so obnoxious and so unsubtle that people are starting to realize that pretty much all advertisements are in one way or another unwanted intrusions into their day.

The "figure out what people want so we can make money selling it to them" part of marketing is a good thing, the "yell at people and shove stuff in their faces while they are trying to do things they actually want to do" is the despicable part.

It isn't that people hate bad marketing, it is that they hate the whole concept that someone thinks it is OK to impose on their lives to make a buck. Some people are more sensitive than others to it. And as you start to look critically you see that almost all advertisements are for scams or truly useless shit. Most ads are misleading at best or are bald-faced deception hiding behind poor court decisions protecting puffery at worst.

Unfortunately the FTC barely has the resources the worst of the worst. Which is why complete scams like the detox footpads persist for so long before they are finally taken off the market. Then the perpetrators get a slap on the wrist, a fine equal to a tiny percentage of their ill gotten profits and they get to move on to their next scam.

 

[lijenstina]

Bill Hicks was right. ( A little cursing warning )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

 

[MMMowman]

"When a popular gaming company hired an agency to do some viral marketing, they came out with a horrible rap about one of their most popular hand-held gaming devices"
Which game company and it's there a youtube video of it?

 

[JohnSmith]

That was fascinating. Please educate us further, then this whole marketeer, consumer relationship can become truly symbiotic... No really I'm not being sarcastic that article was cool.

 

[gamer_parent]

Games marketers tend to stumble around and make lots of mistakes than those in other industries because the Hardard and Wharton MBAs avoid the industry.

Are you saying that after I finish my MBA, I'm going to become jaded and fearful of the gaming industry?

 

[PlasticTree]

Awesome article, I'd love to see more like this on the Escapist.

 

[gamer_parent]

I, for one, attribute most of these poor marketing decision to just the industry itself going through growing pains. The gaming industry has grown at a prodigious rate, but the marketing mechanism and sophisitication has not yet caught up with it yet.

Why?

1. the lifecycle of gaming products are generally much shorter than say, traditional industries. Most games are forgotten in a matter of months, and within a matter of a year or two are generally gone from the public consciousness. (The exception being sequels)

2. processing the amount of information to make truly sophisiticated marketing decisions takes a lot of time and a lot money.

3. gaming industry research and gaming academia are still by comparison in it's infant stages. The article talking about Zynga and social gaming last week allude to an important fact: most game publishers out there have never actually gone ahead and performed truly comprehensive market research, relying mostly on traditionally developed and confirmed markets as their targets. A lot of social gaming devs are now starting to collect matrix on the subject but it is still for the most part, just a small corner of the entire picture.

Points 2 and 3 are particularly important since the implication is that research companies out there specialized in the gaming industry have yet to truly mature and assimilate everything into the marketing model.

i.e. if you talk about the auto industry, you can see that each individual vehicle released by each individual company probably has an entire market analysis behind it that talks about not just spending habits and feature lists, but more on the notion of lifestyle choices, customer emotional values, and a whole host of other factors that can go VERY indepth.

But look at what 99% of the games out there, and generally the emotional value delivered from one to another are more or less similar to one another. They are still sitting on crunching numbers as opposed to synthesizing that with emotional impact.

Incidentally, this is also why gaming narrative is often awful and game publishers will favor sequels over original content. they just don't have enough to go on.

Focus grouping, laugh all you want, is actually an entirely valid way of getting feedback on a game. But more often than not, it is not used extensively enough.

And I'm not even sure most game publishers would ever run a test marketing before launching a product.

 

[fenrizz]

"When a popular gaming company hired an agency to do some viral marketing, they came out with a horrible rap about one of their most popular hand-held gaming devices"
Which game company and it's there a youtube video of it?

I do believe it was Sony with their PSP.

I'm sure it's on youtube somewhere.

 

[Engarde]

I found this very interesting. And I like the whole average age is 35. Heheh. I hope to read more!

 

[Dhatz]

and all this are things perfectly obvious. One thing every dev should realize: it it ain't on gametraielrs, it's highly likely to stay largely unknow. Another importance is you should be concerned about graph rather than average, and that is what EVERYBODY gets wrong, youtube's facebookish thumbs rating has absolutely no informative value(in addition to trashing all previous rating). I would be completely satisfied if they replaced up and down with 5 to 0 stars and kept the graph next to it.

 

[Aurgelmir]

I really and truly hate the "hot chick" trick people use from the very bottom of my heart, so many gaming sites are guilty of thinking that letting a good looking woman with a babe accent open her mouth is going to drive legions of horny males to their site. Especially IGN.

I literally cannot watch IGN reviews because their incredibly dumb chick makes me lose faith in humanity with every passing second.

Oh I agree.

But you would be surprised to know that a lot of those girls are in fact gamers. The issue is that they do not sound that way, and you end up feeling they are just bimbos there to sell their product. Which is both a shame for the girls themselves and the industry in a whole

 

[Tom Phoenix]

Good article. It is refreshing to see someone from marketing with the honesty to admit that their primary goal is to manipulate people and their behaviour.

Now that I think about it, perhaps honesty is the solution to all the problems in game marketing.


But then again, I suppose admitting that the game you are marketing is terrible isn't a very good idea.

 

[Dhatz]

the real threat is how nowadays being a games doesn't mean a thing, every ant would play if we made consoles for ants. Actual meaning now comes only via description as in: if you aren't already tired of specific genres, you are a noob to me.

 

[Whispering Death]

Focus grouping, laugh all you want, is actually an entirely valid way of getting feedback on a game. But more often than not, it is not used extensively enough.

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but focus grouping is best used for exploratory data, trying to uncover the breadth of opinions on an issue; not descriptive data, determining how previlant a given opinion is.

Focus groups are often used incorrectly when viewed by bad marketers as legitimate samples of the overall audiance when, in actuality, focus groups are so small as to be nothing more than annecdotal evidence.

Then you get the bad marketer tendency of when s/he doesn't have market research, instead relying on "industry trends" which is the fastest way to make yourself look silly. This is the kind of thinking where "no, don't make an RTS game. Guitar hero is hot right now, we need to make a band game! The kids love the band games!"

Gamers don't dislike marketers, but they hate bad marketing.

 

[Lord Mountbatten Reborn]

It is not the case that marketers are mustache twirling hollow suits who never learned the true meaning of Christmas. Thanks for sharing, and I look forward to reading more.

There's nothing wrong with moustache-twirling, but I do like how the article tells us what marketers should be doing, as well as the various troubles that marketing comes across. Unless the article is marketing marketers to us all along... I'd best not dwell on this too much.

 

[arkanza]

Thoroughly impressed, nice to see a marketing perspective and a few thoughts spring to mind.

The stereotypes you mention are unfortunately broad and I guess quite common from industry to industry, depending on target audience, but segmentation is a tool in the marketers arsenal that should be used (though to much better effect than currently employed if possible). Though of course identifying an advanced segmentation can be time consuming and costly, especially to a small studio, I'd be interested in knowing how you can combine a message to everyone's liking or in fact identify an audience beyond demographics and console type/game type. More curious than anything. I happen to agree that macho men and girly girl marketing is quite damaging to the profession (and to many people's feelings) but surely there are good examples of marketing segmentation (gamers are quite a large diverse group in this day and age).

A lot of what you mention is what marketers strive for (I hope), but a marketer would have to be very brave and needs a lot of trust behind them to propose a plan to a board that is entirely radical from what they're used to and which might not make the money needed for a company to survive.

Look forward to the next article.