Breaking The Wheel

Strategy

An image of a white space analysis diagram

White Space Analysis: Avoiding The Commoditization Trap

Marketing has the same basic premise as football, judo, and hacking: find the opening and exploit it. In terms of your competition, the opening is known in marketing as the “white space”: the area of the canvas without any color. How does one identify the white space? With a simple exercise called, appropriately enough, a white space analysis.

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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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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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The leadership team of SHAEF from WWII, an image relevant to marketing strategy

Game Marketing Strategy: Mapping Out Your Path to Success

Sun Tzu once said “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” In order for your tactical marketing decisions to be effective, they need to be coordinated around a central strategy. Your strategy is your guiding light for more than just ads. It impacts your target customers, your choice of platform and publisher, and how you respond to competition. In this post, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of establishing a video game marketing strategy.

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An image from Final Fantasy. It turns out that RPG teams are a great analogy for synergies!

Business School Mini-Lesson: What Is A Synergy?

In this post, I tackle one of the most maligned – but, ultimately, vital – terms in business strategy: the infamous synergy. It’s an awful, awful, AWFUL word. But understanding what a synergy is and how to leverage it is crucial.

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A picture of Sun Tzu's the Art of War, which, it turns out, is an amazing book about marketing.

Marketing Games: Sun Tzu And The Fine Art of Succeeding Before You Begin

Marketing games. Some people consider it a necessary evil at best.  At worst, it’s the root of all of the industry’s ills. But what is marketing? The problem is that most people don’t know – and don’t realize they don’t know. And if you don’t know what it is, you can’t effectively develop a marketing strategy or manage the people who do so. You can’t ask your marketing department the right questions if you don’t know what the right questions are. So, before we dive into the functional aspects of marketing, let’s formalize our understanding of the field.

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A image of Marie Curie in an mobile x-ray unit

5 Vital Business Principles in the Form of Pithy Quotes

I. Love. Aphorisms. Sure some are pure hogwash. But the really good ones convey a lot of truth in a small space. In this post, I gathered 5 of my favorite quotes, and explain how they relate to effective management.

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Guest Posting Like A Mofo: Volume I

I’ve been busy guest posting over the last few weeks. And rather than quickly pinch off a lackluster post for this site just for the sake of posting, I’m instead going to talk about what I’ve been up to, and where you can find it.

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