A Rock Star Marketer's Journal

I have worked in the video game business most of my career.  Recently, I’ve moved my attention to the social gaming space for obvious reasons.

One of my “gigs” was at Hasbro Interactive, the digital arm of Hasbro the toy company.  As business unit director I was responsible for taking Hasbro owned IP and bring them digital.  Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, etc.  I had to pick the right platform, right developer and the right product concept.

Part of my training prior to running the business unit was to participate in “Hasbro University”.  It was here that I learned about Hasbro’s brands but most importantly the play patterns associated with particular products.

It was fascinating to watch through a two way mirror the way people played with the traditional products and drill down to the actual play pattern being used.  For instance, a simple example, is children playing with blocks.  Build play pattern.  Children playing with Perfection, time based play pattern.  Or adults playing Trivial Pursuit – knowledge play pattern.  Whatever the play pattern was, it was fundamental to the success of the product, the marketing of the product and the audience.  Girls/Woman, in general love dress up, nurturing, decorating, etc.  Boys/Men are more attracted to destruction, competitiveness and shoot them up.   These are gross exaggerations to get a point across.

As I’ve looked at the social games available on FB, the first thing I look at are the play patterns associated with the products and who must be playing those games based on that information.  Lo and behold, it works.  Take Zynga’s Farmville for example – a game largely played by girls/woman.

I put this type of game into the genre of “sandbox” games.  If you think of an open sandbox, put a variety of children in it, and see how they play.  They all play a little differently.  Girls may bring their dolls in, decorate the area for them and use the sand to cook and make a setting for their precious babies.  Boys on the other hand may bring in their trucks, dig, destruct….you get the picture.

Whether Zynga did this on purpose or not is probably something only Mark Pincus knows.   But by building a “sandbox” game, they opened up their product to the largest possible audience.  Farmville can be played by different audiences in different ways, appealing to both males and females and satisfying the basic play patterns of both audiences.

Of course the other factor that is driving the success of these products is the collaboration – and sorry folks, woman are much more apt to collaborate and help each other than men.

So thank you Hasbro, for the wonderful education in play patterns and understanding the fundamentals to making a product for a particular audience.

A couple of months ago I had a very interesting meeting with a VC backed social gaming company.  Honest to goodness, I was told from this highly educated CEO of a social gaming company,  (don’t even ask, I’m not revealing the name),  ”We don’t need marketing.  Read Jeff Jarvis’ book, “What Would Google Do?”

SO, off I went, bought the book and read.  I do recommend the book.  It’s a lot about the “network effect”, social networking and marketing, although none of those words are used in the description of the book.  And it does in fact paint a simple picture, supported with examples (obviously the largest being Google), that marketing is not needed these days.  And, as this VC guy had done, had bought into the ideation of “If you build it, they will come.”

Well, as a marketer, I beg to differ.  And it’s not just about defending my talent or even my career.  Really.

But it can be very dangerous to think that anyone can have success in not doing “some” sort of marketing.  Unless of course you are first or the best. (more on that later).

Take social gaming for instance.  When games first appeared on Facebook, very few were actually marketed in the traditional sense.  However, the expansion of those games (take Who’s Got the Biggest Brain (from Playfish, who was purchased for $600M to traditional video game company Electronic Arts) for example took advantage of the network effect, viral loops, social media and lots and lots of publicity.  The marketing was built “in the product” from the beginning from its inception.  And now that there are more competitors in the social gaming space we do see games advertised on FB.  Social City certainly just made an effort to get out of the clutter with their new ads clearly targeted to other social gaming customers.

My point is this, at the beginning of any new business growing sector there are success stories of those that launched companies or products without marketing.   But as competitor’s step in, it’s time to add in your marketing engine.