Marketing Weak?

Paul Jobling - Eutechnyx

It is a well known saying that "I know that half of my marketing budget is wasted, the trouble is, I don't know which half" and with Christmas coming ever closer, and the industry not exactly awash with cash, now is a good time to make sure that your company is getting real value for money out of its marketing dollar. Get this right and every Christmas will be a merry one.

There is much more to this than making sure the marketing department negotiates the best deal on media space - I am sure everyone is doing that - but rather asking yourself whether your advertising and promotions really are hitting the consumer square on. Some successful campaigns throw so much at the consumer that some of it is bound to hit, but for those in the real world who do not have an unlimited budget this is a luxury that we can't all afford.

To target your consumer effectively involves a well known, but little used trick of the trade - asking your customer what is important to them. Oddly enough this should be the raison d'etre of any marketing department, but so often a marketing manager is expected to know all of the answers personally (and I've met a few who think they do) rather than carry out the necessary market research to find out what is really happening out there.

Our industry is now a mature market, which over its 20 year history has evolved from humble beginnings to become a multi-billion dollar industry. During this time a great deal of industry legend has built up regarding consumer buying behaviour.
Whole marketing campaigns have been built around industry know-how, but as we move further into the 21st Century, just how well does our industry really know its consumer?

As part of an MSc in Strategic Marketing Management, sponsored by Eutechnyx, an extensive survey was carried out to establish just who was buying computer games and why. The segment of the market chosen was young people eleven to 18 years old mainly because that's who appeared to be doing the buying. These people are referred to as "teenagers" in this article.

Interestingly enough, the marketing world has largely ignored teenagers in terms of researching consumer behaviour and is just starting to wake up to young people as an important market segment. This in itself defies belief as teenagers represent a very powerful and profitable segment of the market, not least of all for video games.

To illustrate this, in America in the late 1980's it was estimated that children represented a $6.2 billion market in direct purchasing power as well as an estimated $128 billion in indirect purchase influence. By 1995 their spending power had risen to $100 billion. In Britain, children have £26 million per week to spend or save as they choose.

It must of course be remembered that a teenagers' overriding purchase motivation is to have fun, and they spend most of their income in this pursuit. This is a key difference between teenagers and adults, most of whom ensure that bills are paid before they can spend money on entertainment.

So what do our customers get when they buy games?
What is clear is that they get more than a computer programme in a box. In their own minds, our customers buy potions to make them feel better. This "feel good" factor is described as being a "psychogenic need" and it is this emotion that our industry must consistently appeal to.

Games allow people to have infinitely more control, power and influence than they could ever get in a whole lifetime. Where else can they fight armies of mutants, drive a formula one car and save the planet all in one afternoon. Therefore for a game to be successful, it cannot just be sold on it's technical features, a game has to give the consumer something they want, be that a feeling of superiority, being connected, desirable, important, even loved, as well as giving them a real feeling of power.

A computer game can appeal to some very basic emotions in human beings. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, these feelings would be classed as "Esteem Needs" - self esteem, recognition by others and status. What is interesting about computer games is that these needs are not, in reality, satisfied. They are only satisfied in the imagination of the person playing the game.
The specialist press has described in great detail how the Sony Playstation opened up the mass market and how a game was no longer purchased solely on technical merit such as it's frame rate or number of polygons it was moving around the screen at any one time. Games are now bought according to what they bring the consumer in terms of how it makes them feel about themselves.

When I started working in the computer games industry about ten years ago, the review was always seen as the pinnacle of judgement in terms of the quality of a product. (This was in spite of the fact that I have seen the same product receive a 90 per cent plus review in some magazines and only 40 per cent in another). Is the situation as it was ten years ago still applicable today? Anecdotally it would appear that our industry still places a great deal of merit in the review, but does our customer?
From the research to date, what is absolutely undeniable, is that reviews are unlikely to be of paramount importance for 40 per cent of our customers, since they do not buy the magazines anyway. But a converse argument hinges around how the review score is used. The review score is often also flashed on product packaging and in non-specialist magazine advertising. In order to take this into consideration the study looked at the influence of the review score in the magazine readers segment and the non-magazine readers segment separately, to see what difference this made.

Amazingly, approximately half of both groups said they would take notice of a review, despite the fact that 40 per cent of them did not read any of the mags the review would most likely appear in. This shows the value of a good review on packaging and associated publicity not least word of mouth generated by good reviews. For example, "Did you hear that Le Mans 24 Hours on PC got a 90 per cent review and a Gold Award", spoken by a friend at school probably carries some weight.
The message here is a simple one - if a game has a good review in a magazine, tell your customers, don't rely on them reading about it in a mag, because nearly half of them won't.

Also don't forget that because of the variation in review scores in magazines, your customer might be reading the wrong mag.
While it came as no surprise to learn that half the teenagers who read magazines take notice of reviews, it was astonishing to discover that one in five of people who read magazines claimed to take no notice of a review, begging the question - what is important to these people instead of reviews? Previews? Adverts? The often undervalued "Cheats"? Or the demo?
The final piece of magazine research considered the covermount demo. I have always believed strongly in the value of a good demo, since this is the main "try before you buy" facility available to a prospective purchaser.

A few years ago the local office of one of our former publishers managed to get the demo of one of our top racing games on the covermount of OPSM , to coincide with the review and the release of the game - as far as we were concerned, this was absolutely perfect timing. The Head office of the publisher, based in a country not far over the English Channel pulled it off the cover because their internal procedure was that someone in their head office should send it out. It eventually reappeared about four months later when the timing was less than ideal.

The research confirmed that 90 per cent of those sampled were influenced by the covermount on the demo, 50 per cent said they would take lots of notice and 40 per cent some notice, with only 10 per cent saying they would take no notice.

This compares very favourably when compared to the other magazine promotions available, with only 26 per cent taking lots of notice of a review and 15 per cent lots of notice of an ad.
Furthermore only ten per cent of those questioned claimed not to take any notice of the covermount, compared with 23 per cent who say they ignore magazine ads, and 17 per cent who claim not to be influenced by reviews.