As a marketing student I was particularly looking forward to UKIE’s Hub Crawl webinar this week. It was focused on branding, which is of course a part of marketing. In this article I’ll discuss some of the key takeaways from the talks.
Tickle Their Emotions
Waste Creative’s Teodora Miscov highlighted some of the most important aspects about marketing. Too often people forget that marketing is a science that involves the ability to read data and understand human psychology.
So it was great to hear Miscov discuss how the emotions of the audience play an important role in marketing.
There is a hot debate in the marketing world on exactly how much emotion impacts the purchasing habits of a customer. A relatively new theory suggests that every person makes purchases based solely on emotion.
So what exactly does that mean? Simply, the better you provoke an emotion the more likely people are to remember you. And interestingly it doesn’t have to be a good emotion, a good example of this is a game like OutLast. You can bet I didn’t buy OutLast because seeing it made me happy.
Make People Think
Many companies, gaming or not will simply directly tell a customer why their game is better than the rest. Things like “OVER 500 LEVELS!”, this is great. But it does not always stick with the audience.
So when you create marketing materials, consider how you can engage with the audience by making their brain wake up. A good trick for this is ask a simple question, or if you chuck in an Easter Egg in your content it will fire their brain up – assuming they get it. This can also create an emotional response to your marketing content, and in turn your game.
Speaking of Easter Eggs, the next speaker – India Atkin a trainee solicitor from Wiggin talked about them a little. She explained that Easter Eggs have varying levels of risk, our first game Double Pug Switch has lots of Easter Eggs. If you read my previous piece and took the advice from it then you should be covered from any issues with having Easter Eggs in your game.. Either way she made an excellent point: make sure you know where they are, so if anything does go wrong you can remove them easily.
Benefits For Employees Affect Brand
On a very obvious level, if your employees start bashing your company for whatever reason then the public and press begin to see your brand in a different way – unless you’re rocking that over worked, underpaid style.
But the benefits you give your employees will also affect how those in the gaming industry see your brand. Why is that important? Aside from the fact it is always nice to not look awful, it’s important because the worse your brand image is, the more likely you are to scare off your talent pool. If your brand is known in the gaming industry for not helping create pensions, or using any of the employee benefit programs then people are more likely to shy away.
Now I’m not going to yap on about all the various benefits you can offer your employees, but David Taylor from Connor Broadley runs over some of the best strategies, and explains in more detail why employee care affects your brand. You can watch his 15 minute presentation here.
Defining Your Brand
We wrapped up with a panel about building your brand. Building a brand can be cheap, because everything you do affects your brand when you’re representing your company. If you are at an event and each member of your team has the same way of talking, and presents themselves in the same way that’ll affect how people think of your brand.
If you’re lost on how to build your brand, then a good route is: Find your audience > Learn about the audience > Build on that. The foundation of your brand should be your customers and audience.
Having a little flexibility on your brand is important, be adaptable. This will help you if you change markets, or if you are trying to tap into different regional markets.
Final Top Tips: Always monitor your surroundings, look at other markets and see what works. What influences your community.
Ensure your brand is consistent with who you are. Or people will get super mad.
Thanks for reading, if you missed last weeks write up on starting up a business check it out here. If you want to watch all of the talks from the webinar, UKIE uploaded them here. Next week’s webinar is all about talent and recruitment.