Breaking The Wheel

A picture of lots of words, cause thats what a marketing communication strategy involves

Marketing Communication Strategy

Before you start an awareness campaign, you need to – say it with me now – develop a strategy. The first step was the positioning exercise from the last post. With that in hand, we can move to more esoteric, but ultimately vital aspect of marketing communication strategy.

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Composite image for the covers of Mass Effect 2 and Dark Souls, two games that featured expert positioning

Market Positioning: The Art of Fighting Without Fighting

Perception is reality, as the saying goes. Market positioning is the act of managing consumer perception of a product. This doesn’t mean misleading people or bending the facts. It means establishing and controlling the context in which you want your customers to consider your product. And effective positioning can make a world of difference between standing out from or getting lost in the crowd.

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An image of Facebook's ad campaign interface which can be used to estimate the upside of a market segment

Video Game Market Potential: How To Quantify Your Odds of Success

Once you’ve drilled down into your target segment and tested some of your assumptions, you now need to quantify whether that segment can be profitable. If you work for a major publisher, you have access to a professional marketing department that does this sort of thing for a living. But if you don’t, you’re not out of luck. You have an amazing tool at your disposal for free: Facebook.

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A picture of a question mark, because customer interviews involve questions. Get it?

Customer Interviews: Conducting Effective One-On-Ones

Henry Ford once famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” More recently, Steve Jobs said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” What these quotes are really getting at is the danger of interview-driven design. If you ask people what they want, they’ll just say “faster, better, cheaper.” And creating new products is YOUR job, not your customers’. It’s unreasonable to expect customers to tell you what products to make. Imagining completely new products is not their in their skillset.

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A picture of our hypothetical buyer persona, Rita Roleplayer

Buyer Persona: Identifying Your Hypothetical Player

Once you have identified a target segment, your next step is to learn as much about that segment as you can. But how do you even know where to look? The first step is to imagine a person who embodies that segment, in the form of a buyer persona.

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Example diagram of video game market segmentation

Video Game Market Segmentation

One of Sun Tzu’s most quotable lines from The Art of War is “Know thy enemy and know thyself and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” And while you should never think of customers as the “enemy,” it’s still crucial to understand them in order to wage a successful marketing campaign. Understanding your customer means figuring out who they are, what their needs are and how you can serve those needs. And the first step in that journey is video game market segmentation.

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