Have you ever thought that marketing and gaming could be similar in some ways? Marketing and gaming share the same goals, as for marketing, you want your consumers do business with you and stick with you, while in gaming you want gamers to try your game and make them stay to finish it through all the levels. In a post “Where Games and Marketing Collide” by Karl, he says:
Here are a couple of thoughts on the convergence of goals between marketers and games:
- Customer Acquisition is a metric to build a business on for both advertisers and game designers (worth watching Scott Foe’s talk on the economics of games here)
- Progressive Immersion and Continuous Engagement – both game designers and advertisers want to move prospects and players progressively through a lifecycle. For advertisers it might be from awareness to consideration with game designers it’s from one level of challenge to another.
- Communicate and Influence Culture – Advertisers communicate and influence culture through stories and symbols. Games immerse players in a value system from which culture or sub-culture is created.
- Motivation – this is where games and marketing collide, game designers and ad planners are both masterful at understanding human motivation and the empathic design necessary to move the emotional levers. If you put a conference together of ad planners and game designers I believe that sparks would fly
Marketing and gaming is the same in another way. You need to give your consumers something new and with a different level just as like the gamers level up and faces new challenges and new features. And the other is, just as there is in all the games, marketing also has it’s “Game Over” sign when you lose.
