Game Marketing and Advertising - Weekly Journal - Week 1

The Four C's

"The Four C's" are a marketing concept that cover the 4 categories of marketing.

Content is the stuff. This is your game, your book, your... whatever. It's the thing you are creating and all the related things that go with it. The user manual, soundtrack, intellectual property, everything.

Conduit is how customers get your stuff. This can be an online store like Steam, or a physical store like Best Buy. Depending on the form your content takes this may not necessarily be a store. Like a video for instance could have YouTube as the conduit.

Consumption is the advertising and sales related to the content. For most modern video games, most of this is likely handled by the platform you chose as your conduit, but this can also take other forms like billboards for advertising or PayPal for making sales.

Convergence is combining multiple technologies to get a more integrated experience. This can be something simple, like a companion app that gives users some extra features or something more complicated like an intertwined TV show that changes content with how the player is doing.

The Customer Funnel

This is also known as AIDA, which is an acronym for its parts; Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. Each step funnels into the next as some, and hopefully not a lot, of customers are lost on each step.

Awareness is the stage of marketing where potential customers become aware that your product exists. Like any other funnel, the more customers you can get in this stage the better the result will be.

Interest is the stage where that awareness becomes interest. This is where you want to show customers why to pick your product over the other options they have in the marketplace.

Decision is the stage where people make the decision to become your customer. You need to ensure your marketing that got them to this point includes the information they need to move forward from this stage.

Action is where the people that decided to become your customer take that action and become your customer. This is where they actually complete the purchase.

Marketing Message

The marketing message is the information you want to relay to customers, and how you deliver it. The decision on how to communicate with customers and what methods to take are important and can shape the narrative for your company greatly. How the message takes form can leave a lasting impression on customers and hopefully make you more memorable. Take the Geek Squad for instance, nearly everyone will recognize them by the way they dress and the police-style badges they wear. Even down to the vocabulary they use to refer to customer computers (suspects) and the store itself (the precinct) are part of their message.

The message does not have to stay the same all the time, it can vary by season like with clothing, or with different holidays too.

Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude is a really cool word that is a measure of how well something matches the laws and rules of a given world, rather then matching the real world. An example of low verisimilitude is the now infamous wristwatch in Braveheart, even if it was an accident, because timepieces in that fashion did not exist in that time.

Low verisimilitude would be things that break the "suspension of disbelief" when consuming media, and conversely things that improve the "suspension of disbelief" are things that have high verisimilitude.