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On Friday, Stew Hogarth kicked off a debate on Twitter. It focused on whether product or marketing was more important, with Stew making an impassioned case that if you don’t have any money, the product is the ONLY tool that you have at your disposal. After a lengthy discussion with the likes of Brian Baglow, Colin Anderson, George Bray and Amanda Porelli, Stew wrote up his thoughts in a blog post entitled When you have no PR / marketing budget, the Product MUST be right….
The three key points were:
- You can only shovel a shit product to people if you have lots of money behind it.
- Critical acclaim does not equal sales.
- Where you have no marketing budget, the product is all you have, so it needs to be the right product for the platform and audience.
Point three is where I disagree with Stew. And I disagree at a totally fundamental level.
Marketing is about understanding your customers
The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as:
“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”
Note that there is no mention of spending money, of TV adverts or massive campaigns. The core skill of marketing is understanding your customers.
That doesn’t seem unlike the core skill of a game developer.
In the fabulous Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell says:
“The most important skill for a game designer is listening.”
He goes further, and says that a game designer must list to Team, Audience, Game, Client and Self. That’s a lot of listening.
And the heart of that listening is to identify, anticipate and satisfying customer requirements.
Game designers and developers may say “It’s all about the creativity, man”, and I get that.
But creativity that focuses on making something that no-one wants to play is self-indulgent twaddle. If you are a game developer who doesn’t have at least one eye firmly fixed on your audience, you are not a game developer.
You’re a hobbyist.
Marketing does not mean advertising
Just because you have no marketing budget, does not mean you don’t need marketing. The spending of money is the least skilful, least value-added part of the marketing function.
I mean any muppet could spend $1 million on some TV ads, a few magazine spreads and the usual web suspects like Eurogamer and IGN right.
The key skill of marketing is to identify the absolute essence of your product that will persuade customers to buy it, it is not about throwing money at media placements.
As Patrick O’Luanaigh, former creative director of Eidos and now CEO of nDreams says in his book Game Design Complete :
“You must have a hook. You must be able to summarize what makes your game idea distinctive in a sentence.”
Is finding the hook a marketing skill or a creative skill?
There is no distinction between product and marketing
This is my biggest point. Product development IS marketing. They are both about finding the essence of a consumer need and giving it to them.
In the case of a game (as opposed to a widget, a toothpaste or a car), that need can be pretty nebulous. It might be to be:
- Entertained
- Rewarded
- Challenged
- Scared
- Encouraged
In fact, for games, the list is nearly endless. Usually, the key creative idea comes not from what the market wants, but from what the creator wants to create.
That’s fine. It’s great that a creator wants to make something that will challenge, entertain, reward or, even better, leave the user changed in some positive way as a result of experiencing their game.
But to do that without an eye on the audience is madness. Few, if any, creators don’t give a shit about their audience.
And if they do give a shit about their audience, they’re thinking like marketers.
Sorry, Stew, I think you’re wrong
It’s not that I disagree with your three points, per se.
It’s that I disagree with your definition. Marketing IS product development. Marketing IS creativity. Marketing IS a vital skill for every game maker.
Whether they like it or not.
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Read Seth Godin.
I got on a major Godin kick to the middle and end of last year and his whole way of looking at what marketing actually is (his idea is that marketing and product development are the same thing) and read several books of his on the subject.
I have played a number on "social games" on Facebook and the one thing that has really kept me on a few of them is how much the developer respects their audience. Zynga failed in that respect. Playdom so far is doing well.
My ongoing struggle with marketing as a designer is that it is always looking backwards, looking at what has worked in the past. I can see the value in studying history but my experience is that they just do risk management... and that usually leads to a demand to copy some tried and true (and often over worn) idea with the mantra of, "It made them money, it will probably make us money."
A designer understands conventions and their value, but there is another important force in making fun, innovation, and there isn't an objective way to predict the effect of innovation. I often hear the successful designer mantra, "I try to make games that I would want to play."
In my experience, marketing is important to risk management and is valuable to product development, but it's analytical basis prevents it from being all encompassing when it comes to making fun.
I think part of the problem is that many Marketers are by-the-numbers rote-robots. Good ones work with the design and development team to provide two communication between the market (by which I mean users) and the team.
Too often, marketing means either, as you say, risk management or advertising.
It's nice when someone takes the trouble to submit a thoughtful reply.
What a lot of marketing=product development ideas are about in this new age is not that. They're talking about building genuine buzz by making remarkable products. Godin describes that as making products worth talking about as the future, for instance, because the traditional channels are not working so well any more. You need products that market themselves by what they are, not just what their ads say they are. It all ties together.
So to say you're making fun is all well and good, but are you making remarkable fun (i.e. something different, trying to make a Minecraft etc) or are you making conventional fun (genre games, easily summarised, obvious) which your company then intends to "market". If the former, that is the future. If the latter, your chances of succeeding are dwindling because that is the land of the me-too game and nobody talks about me-too games because they're not really that interesting.
The other new school of thought in all this is lean development. Lean development is the process of taking an idea out to market as fast as possible and validating in some way that the idea actually has legs before going any further with it. You validate that it has legs by getting people to spend money on it in some form (no other validation is really all that valid).
So if you have an awesome gameplay idea, can you take it to market as a 2D flash game first to test that it's as awesome as you think it is? If you think about it, many (not all) if the beloved franchises of today actually had humbler, less expensive beginnings. They validated themselves by selling copies in the old days, and then increased their production costs and standards incrementally. Lean is sort of the same idea, but for modern times.
I actually am interested to see if companies integrate the idea for lean dev and market testing to the degree that you suggest. I'd love to see the concept of a new IP tested in a quick, cheap Flash game before full development ramps up. IE make a quick intro game in the universe you developed for your new RPG epic to see if there is enough interest to warrant spending $20 million on the first AAA entry.
Good thoughts there, Tadhg.
But:
"If you are a game developer who doesn’t have at least one eye firmly fixed on your audience, you are not a game developer. You’re a hobbyist."
I could not disagree more. A Game Designer if firstly an artist. It does matter if he is successful or his games sell well. The basic parallel are books. There are many authors that create deep works of art. Seldom these are bestsellers.
The important notion is that a Game Designer is not a Product Designer. Though in a professional setting, these two roles merge. You try to build a game that will sell well and marketing is trying to help with that.
Marketing seems better phrased as communication. Marketing isn't product design. It's feedback on product design. I think the difference is important. Marketing isn't creativity beyond creatively extracting the relevant thoughts, needs and attitudes of the impending game's market.
Design that thinks it can ignore marketing is arrogant. So is Marketing that thinks it can Design.
When marketing designs, you get Zynga. Everything is controured for mass appeal as driven by metrics, etc. There's limited actual "design" beyond affecting the final form of what an external force tells me needs to be dropped into the pot. Marketng doesn get you anything new. Marketing is "what works" and an assessment of what might work.
Marketing is The Force. Apt for both good and evil. And once you start down the dark path ever will it rule your destiny.
Its vital to understand existing users/gamers not just for marketing, but because nobody really wants to be presented with something they can't understand.
This is the same as genre conventions in film - too much and it becomes hackneyed, too little and nobody is able to find a "hook" to help them understand your product.
I'm a marketing student and I can try to bring my pov. To avoid all misunderstood notions, marketing is basiclly a mix marketing management (= theory but really senseful notion with Product, Price, Place, Promotion).
So, when you consider this theory, creativity is included in the global marketing strategy (in the Product management)
Moreover, it's a great shame to reduce Marketing to Advertising (ad in the Promotion)
From my part, (videogames) marketing is only a tool to help game developers. All employees need to have a marketing vision and they need to understand what kind of games they want to develop and if these games could be sell. Business is totally linked with marketing and game devpt. We can't lose sight of this main objective.
As I liked to say, thanks to the marketing you can sell a good product at a good price to the good consumer.
sry for my crappy english
My guess is that these less obvious forms of product were experimentally created before the reason for their appeal was known. Then the producers blindly felt their way toward the market. Brave and creative exploration towards new markets may yield surprises!