by Taylan Kadayifcioglu on 22 April, 2009 - 12:59
Now that it has been a while since my last branding related post, it is about time to put it all into perspective and think about what this means for a developer. To do that, I ask the question:
Is it possible that developers have been delegating/neglecting their marketing function a bit too much and unnecessarily, to the point of losing control over the value generated?
A while ago I had the chance to listen to an interesting presentation given by Greg Speakman, the VP Marketing of Sierra Wireless. Part of the presentation was about the difficulties of marketing something that is essentially a consumer electronic product through a B2B channel. Since they did not have the marketing budget to reach the consumer, their lifeline was their business partners like AT&T, who included Sierra Wireless products in heir own offerings. Thus, they were focused on marketing to such partners. I remember him saying how he wished they could make the consumer demand a Sierra Wireless product specifically. If their brand name was strong enough to influence a purchase, then they would have significantly more bargaining power in their deals with business partners.
Their situation has a striking similarity to the relationship between game developers and publishers. A video game is essentially produced for the consumption of individuals. Yet a developer does not sell the game to the consumer directly. They sell to the publisher. In this relationship, the publisher is the heavily dominant party because:
The developers lack bargaining chips, because most of the time they do not have the brand power to influence a purchase. There are exceptions of course, as discussed in my previous posts. The usual remark about examples like Will Wright or Bioware, though, is that "they have their own brand equity because they were successful in the first place." But let us turn that on its head and think: "maybe they are successful because they have their own brand equity." It is a chicken and egg argument, I know. But even realizing that means you are aware that this thing has more than one direction at a time.
At the end of that presentation from Greg Speakman, I had to ask him whether they had ever considered low cost B2C marketing campaigns through e-marketing. I was pretty surprised when he admitted that no, it had never crossed their minds.
It was surprising because that was a notable company in the high-tech communications business, yet they had completely forgotten about a powerful communication channel like the internet. It is the same surprise I have, when companies on the cutting edge of new media and content creation tend to underestimate their own reach to the consumers, and blissfully hand over their marketing functions to other parties.
"Oh no, we don't do marketing," says the game developer happily. "Let the publisher spend money for that, we can't be bothered with marketing on top of everything else."
I suspect the publishers are even happier for the fact.
Original Post: http://thesellinggame.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-game-devs-should-rethink-marketing.html
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
RSS
Add your comment