For some reason, when someone says “Marketing,” most everybody in earshot hears “Advertising.” This is a gross oversimplification. I’ll counter with an oversimplification of my own: marketing is “getting people to buy stuff.” Nearly every step of a business model is impacted by marketing, because every aspect of a business is in some way, shape, or form about getting people to buy stuff. Advertising is only a very small part of that much larger process. Marketing is not something that happens only after you have something to sell; when done best, marketing is a continual process that permeates the entire business venture, from start to finish. Which is really easy to say, and is a hopelessly tangled mess of actual practice. Here’s my attempt to explain it in its most basic terms.

Talking the Talk

In its neverending goal to get people to buy stuff, marketing focuses on providing customers utility, which you can think of as the valuable aspects of a product. Utility itself comes in five flavors — form, place, time, possession, and information. Form utility is the basics of a product’s features — its sturdy construction, great taste, vibrant color, whatever. Place utility is where the customer is able to purchase the product. Time utility is when the customer is able to purchase the product. Possession utility is the means by which the customer can purchase the product — cash, check, charge, trade, et cetera. Lastly, information utility is what the customer knows about the product. Marketing strives to increase utility — so when you publish your book with better paper, you are increasing the form utility of the book. Quickly, compare a book which is only available for purchase at gaming conventions — it has pretty low place and time utility, since it would be ridiculously difficult to get your hands on a copy. However, by putting the book up for sale online, the publisher is drastically increasing both time and place utility, since it can be purchased anytime, anywhere. Oversimplifying, selling only at Cons is poor marketing; selling online is better marketing.

Obviously, in the “getting people to buy stuff” trade, there are a thousand factors bearing on every purchasing decision. Marketers try to increase utility by controlling the four things that they actually have a hope of controlling — product, place, price, and promotion. These “four Ps” are called the marketing mix. Product involves deciding what you are selling and how your product meets the needs of a given market. Place involves lots more than just deciding where you’d like to sell your product — it involves distribution, local laws, transportation, not to mention figuring out where the customers are to begin with. Price is probably the most obvious, and the most computationally complex — how much will you sell the product for, and how much will customers be willing to spend for it? Lastly, promotion comprises all of the efforts to interest customers in shelling out their hard-earned for your product. Advertising, if you were curious, falls within promotion, along with publicity, salesmanship, special offers, packaging, and a host of other things.

Walking the Walk

Here’s the thing that makes me hop up and down like crazy: it’s not that people don’t realize that advertising is a small part of marketing, or that there are other things that they should be doing. It’s that advertising can only be done effectively in the context of the rest of marketing. To take the simplest example, you can make up some absolutely awesome banner ads for your product, and you could pay a modest fee to some web-advertising firm that will make sure those ads appear in regular rotation online. Unless those ads appear where your potential customers can see them, however — that is, unless you take place into account — all that effort is for naught. Nobody sees the ads; nobody buys the book. End of story.

Chances are, you’re still reading this thinking about applying all of this to an existing product. Try to take a step back and stop thinking about this in terms of “guy who wrote this game” and start thinking in terms of “guy who writes games.” Doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but it’s huge. The first guy tries to start his marketing after he’s written the game, which may work — if he’s lucky. The second guy, on the other hand, starts his marketing before he starts writing his game. Sounds backwards? It isn’t really — it just entails thinking about what sort of game he can write that other people would be interested in playing. We actually have a sort of failsafe in gaming, since it’s hard to write a game without ever thinking of other people playing it — we naturally think about our friends that with whom we usually play games, playing the game that we’re writing.

So if we’re already doing this by default, why am I bitching about the lack of marketing? It’s the context thing, again. Designers will write a game thinking about their four friends and then advertise the game on RPGnet, which their friends despise (for instance). The awareness of the implicit target market that informs the design process absolutely must be linked to the rest of the marketing process. If you make your game for your friends who are all ivory tower academics, you are wasting your time working hard to, say, distribute it through game stores that they or people like them would never enter. This works both forwards and backwards, though. Ideally, the designer should be thinking of who the product will sell to while designing the game. This doesn’t mean diluting the game to the lowest common denominator; in fact with Full Light, Full Steam, once I decided that I was shooting for an adult market I was able to jettison a lot of rather puerile text explaining the basics of mercantilism and the politics of empire. I didn’t need that drek anymore; I could focus on what was important to me!

The Marketing Firewall

This is why mainstream publishing - novels and magazines and nonfiction books and stuff — is run by editors. People all over the world sit down and write a short story or novel or thesis every day, following the dictates of their muse or whatever metaphor for creativity you want to allude to. There’s nothing wrong with this, and in fact the whole process can be really enjoyable and satisfying for the author — but that doesn’t mean it’s something that other people will pay money for. Quality does not equal profitability. So the finished manuscript is sent off to a publishing house, staffed by editors, and it is then and only then that the business really starts operating. The editors are not there to serve the authors; the editors serve the publishing house, selecting from this pool of avilable written works the things that they believe will sell. That selection process is entirely directed by marketing concerns, judging the potential utility of the manuscripts and considering potential marketing mixes for the book. Only the manuscripts that show promise are greenlighted and proceed to manufacture. The ensuing success of the product is, to be charitable, the result of the skill of the author, but the overall success of the publishing house is the result of those marketing decisions made by the editors. Good decisions create profits and protect against losses; bad decisions waste resources and opportunities.

That editorial firewall between the writing and manufacture is a safety measure — and one that self-published authors often lack. It has happened all too often that a self-published author sunk a great deal of cash into manufacturing a product that just didn’t sell. We need to turn a critical eye on our own work, and consider not “Is this a quality work?” but “How can I devote assets to this product in a profitable way?” If you’re not comfortable with such questions but don’t think that that should disqualify you from writing games, you’re absolutely right. Go ahead and write games to your heart’s content. But if you don’t like asking these questions, you should stay the hell away from publishing them.

We need to be editors of our own little publishing houses, asking those marketing questions at every step of the process, from start to finish. When looking at a manuscript, we can consider what size the final book should be, but if we start asking questions earlier, when we’re looking at ideas, or mechanics, or settings, we can consider broader questions: Should this product be a book? Would this be a stronger product as a card game? How can I make this available anywhere, anytime, and still earn a profit? Who would like to play this game, and how do I contact them? Can I increase the form utility of this product by using the hyperlink capabilities of the pdf format rather than assuming linear textuality of printed matter? How can I package this concept? How easily is that transported? Or perhaps simply: how can I get this to pay my way to GenCon next year?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.