Week 4.04 Reflection — Building Awareness for your Game

I cultivated a passion for marketing when I started my previous business. In fact, I fed and clothed my family for nearly 8 years based on my ability to get my services in front of potential clients and convert them. I also won a Best Business award back in 2014 primarily because of my marketing activities, got featured in the Entrepreneur’s Circle monthly magazine and was nominated Entrepreneur of the Month twice. As you can imagine, I was really looking forwards to this module on the course because despite this, there is so much I don’t know nor understand about marketing a business.

Much of the content for this week followed that well trodden path of ‘Who, what, what, when, where, why and how’, and as Kipling so aptly put…

I first stumbled across this quote several years ago whilst researching the work of Gary Halbert, perhaps one of the greatest and most influential marketers of his day and, more recently, John Carlton . One of the big lessons for me from the works of both gentlemen was neatly summarised by Nigel Botterill as one of the rules in his book Botty’s Rules (Botterill, 2011)

That last quote resonated on so many levels and, although at the time of writing I no longer run a business, it still does to this day. Running a business is not about making excuses about why things aren’t working. If they’re not working, as a business owner, it’s my responsibility to fix it. As a photographer, I could make all the excuses to my family about why I didn’t get a booking but those excuses won’t feed nor clothe hungry and cold children.

As soon as I realised this, I suddenly woke up to the fact if I was to survive in the industry I needed to get damn good at marketing post-haste. For me, this was my ‘decision to go’ .

The course material and research into games industry marketing this week created a warm, familiar feeling within me as it underpinned all of the above and much more that I’ve not written about here. Much of what I’ve learned in the past still holds true within the games industry with a few tweaks here and there to cater for industry-specific idiosyncrasies.

Ultimately, when I launch my own studio (most likely after I graduate owing to the time commitment of the course!) any success will be wholly dependent on my ability as a marketer to drive players to my game. An interesting case study is that of a former work colleague. He’d devised an interesting word game for a smartphone. It was a novel idea, quick to learn and easy to play with the right amount of frustration to get one hooked. The UI was very slick and it looked great. It was the perfect game to really appeal to the casual gamer. I don’t have any recent data as we’ve since parted ways but back when it was launched he was getting very few downloads. Clearly, simply publishing a game wasn’t enough, to enjoy the success the game warranted, he needed to up his marketing game too. The days of ‘if you publish it, they will download and play it‘ are long gone.

One very interesting topic that arose this week was that of personal branding . I’m not sure at this point if this is a direction I want to take for several reasons. When I was a photographer and I sold a service, in many ways I was the product. Clients would commission me for one of two reasons:

• they liked my prices, or
• they liked my work

I certainly wasn’t the cheapest so hopefully it was the latter and, given the number of word of mouth referrals I received, I like to think this was a big part of it. Indeed, personal branding was one of the core tenets of my marketing strategy back then as I wanted to position myself as a ‘celebrity’ photographer (as opposed to a photographer of celebrities). I remember discussing with my business coach, Angus Lyon, I wanted to be the go-to-guy for fashion portraiture in the area and this element of my marketing was beginning to work at the time I broke my shoulder and was forced to give it all up.

It took a huge amount of time and effort to build a following and a community though and as I started to home in on 10,000 followers on twitter and instagram it felt like I was having to continuously feed the monster. It became very impersonal too with my channels evolving from engagement to broadcast as the numbers grew.

At this point of my career, when it comes to personal branding for my games, I feel the amount of effort needed to position myself as a celebrity designer would be better spent making games. That may change in time, but, as of now I want to concentrate on creating and launching my first game.

Secondly, one possible end-game scenario I am considering is building value in the brand to make selling the studio a viable option in the future. If I am the brand, this will likely have negative consequences on the price.

Conclusion

When it comes to marketing a studio and creating the marketing plan for my assignment in a few weeks, I feel I have a somewhat unfair advantage over my peers having done a lot of this in the past. That said, I’m fully aware that this is (a) a different industry altogether, and (b) primarily for an academic submission at this stage. There is also a huge (c) in that there is so much I don’t know as marketing is a huge topic in it’s own right.

My Marketing Plan will ultimately live within a separate post that won’t become public until much later in the course, if at all.

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash