On Friday, Stew Hogarth kicked off a debate on Twitter. It focused on whether product or marketing was more important, with Stew making an impassioned case that if you don’t have any money, the product is the ONLY tool that you have at your disposal. After a lengthy discussion with the likes of Brian Baglow, Colin Anderson, George Bray and Amanda Porelli, Stew wrote up his thoughts in a blog post entitled When you have no PR / marketing budget, the Product MUST be right….
The three key points were:
You can only shovel a shit product to people if you have lots of money behind it.Critical acclaim does not equal sales.Where you have no marketing budget, the product is all you have, so it needs to be the right product for the platform and audience.Point three is where I disagree with Stew. And I disagree at a totally fundamental level.
Marketing is about understanding your customersThe Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as:
“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”Note that there is no mention of spending money, of TV adverts or massive campaigns. The core skill of marketing is understanding your customers.
That doesn’t seem unlike the core skill of a game developer.
In the fabulous Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell says:
“The most important skill for a game designer is listening.”He goes further, and says that a game designer must list to Team, Audience, Game, Client and Self. That’s a lot of listening.
And the heart of that listening is to identify, anticipate and satisfying customer requirements.
Game designers and developers may say “It’s all about the creativity, man”, and I get that.
But creativity that focuses on making something that no-one wants to play is self-indulgent twaddle. If you are a game developer who doesn’t have at least one eye firmly fixed on your audience, you are not a game developer.
You’re a hobbyist.
Marketing does not mean advertisingJust because you have no marketing budget, does not mean you don’t need marketing. The spending of money is the least skilful, least value-added part of the marketing function.
I mean any muppet could spend $1 million on some TV ads, a few magazine spreads and the usual web suspects like Eurogamer and IGN right.
The key skill of marketing is to identify the absolute essence of your product that will persuade customers to buy it, it is not about throwing money at media placements.
As Patrick O’Luanaigh, former creative director of Eidos and now CEO of nDreams says in his book Game Design Complete
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