about the universe forum commander Shop Now Commanders Circle
Product List FAQs home Links Contact Us

Monday, April 13, 2009

FREE MARKETING ADVICE AT GTS

Steve Cole writes:

Every time I go to GTS (the annual GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas), I get approached by two, or three, or four "marketing consultants" who want to help me. I get Emails all the time from consultants wanting to set up appointments at GTS to explain what they can do for me.

These guys fall into two categories.

1. A guy from inside the industry who lost his job (usually selling advertising in game publications to game publishers) and is trying to make a go of consulting. (You have to think of the game business like Show Business. Everybody wants to be in it, and the choices (if no game company will hire you) are publish your own games, open a retail store, or be a consultant.)

2. Somebody from outside the industry who knows nothing about this unique and bizarre and strange and wonderful industry we are in, but thinks he can apply what he knows about general marketing to this strange industry (which seems to be full of amateur businessmen ripe for the consulting services on offer). Sometimes they are selling mailing lists (I'll mail out 10,000 of your catalogs for $1 each! No, I cannot guarantee a result.) and sometimes just "consulting" (I can tell you what to do and how to do it! No, I cannot guarantee a result.) I can remember one year GAMA got some marketing genius (a real one, who makes a six figure income) to come give a seminar, and she knew nothing about the game industry and every time she started explaining one of her "sure fire" ideas (e.g., door knob hangars), the audience of small publishers would erupt with laughter about how that did not apply to our market, or had already been tried (and failed) by everyone in the room.

Frankly, none of these consultants know more about this industry or marketing than 90% of us publishers already know, which is why nobody is jumping at a chance to meet with a marketing consultant. Almost all of us know what to do and how to do it, and all of us know that it's going to cost money (or worse, TIME) to do and will show a slow, grinding success, gaining a few stores but not breaking into the whole industry in one night. If the inside-the-industry consultants were making successful careers of selling marketing advice, I'd go into that business. My free on-line book about running a game company includes a bunch of marketing advice. You can go to any university bookstore and for $50 buy a first-class marketing textbook (or for $10 buy last year's marketing book) that will teach you more about basic concepts and cost you less than these consultants. If you want the best marketing advice you can buy, go to GTS, go to the dinners, and sit down at a table full of small-press publishers and just ASK US and we'll babble about marketing ideas that do work (if slowly) for as long as you want to sit there.

Few if any of these consultants actually get a client and those that do either don't seem to have much success or the client is so darn happy with his multi-million dollar sales that he kept very, very quiet about how well it worked. If somebody out there has grown to the size of WOTC without telling the rest of us THAT he did it (not how he did it, I can respect a need to keep successful magic bullets secret), well, shame on you!

As others have said, there is no magic bullet, and the basic concepts of marketing (if you tailor them to the game industry, which we all know is very strange) yield slow if steady results. None of us has the time to do it right, but we all do as much as we can.

If you consultant guys want to actually make a living, here's a deal. I'll pay you money for every new store you get to carry my games. (We'll work out the details.) Not for trying, not for how many stores you call, not for building brand awareness, but for stores not currently carrying my products which place an order through one of the wholesalers.

And I'll tell you the best marketing there is in this industry (other than getting your cover art to Alliance on time): jumping through the hoops Aldo required to get a free "ad" in his magazine. (I would have PAID Aldo if he would telephone me, told he had kidnapped my cat and would release him when I turned in the required materials, then called back in an hour.) The new publishers no longer use this magazine in the way Aldo did, which is a loss for the entire industry.