| Set On Stun |

I recently read a fantastic article from Taylan Kay on his blog, The Selling Game.  Taylan proposes that in order to understand marketing in video games, it’s critical to understand why people play games.

The critical theory that he lays out is that gaming, competition, skill acquisition and skill retention all have their roots in our common mammalian evolution.  The skills and strategies we learn while playing with each other creates a skill stickiness that can serve us in other areas of life.  The example he gives of skill aquisition and retention, mouse catching skills in cats, are learned, reinforced, refined and ultimately retained by kittens and cats playing with their toys.  When the cat uses these skills to actually catch a mouse, the practical application of play-time gives the cat a distinct survival advantage.  If the reward, food, sex or survival, is beneficial enough, the brain recognizes this as relevant information and stores it for future reference and refinement.  During my animal behavior classes, another survival technique is to find ways to minimize energy expendature while maximizing rewards.  In other words, we can open a can of beans with a pair of scissors, but the time expended and possibility of injury doesn’t make this a practical application of energy.  The reward of some tasty beans may not replace the energy expended, which makes this endeavor a negative survival advantage.  This is why we play, we experiment and we build new tools and strategies to get the reward with minimum expendature.  In marketing, this is called ROI.

This brings us to the Relevance x Stickiness factor.  Relevance is how applicable the information is to obtain the desired reward.  When trying to open up the can of beans, relevance is measured by the effectiveness of the tools.  A pair of scissors has a low relevance, a pocket-knife has a low-medium relevance, a hand operated can opener has a medium-high relevance and an electric can opener has a high relevance.  Each tool can bring about some tasty beans, but the electric can opener delivers the highest reward vs. the lowest amount of work. In marketing, relevance is measured by engagement.  Marketers look at the level of activity, the time on site, the number of videos posted, the number of comments… etc.

Neuroplasticity relates to relevance because as a behavior becomes learned, practiced and refined, the brain recongnizes this behavior as an important survival tactic and the neurons re-organize themselves to “remember” that behavior.  Essentially, it becomes hard-coded behavoir rather than emergent behavior.  This is how stickiness is achieved.  If a behavior, like opening a can of beans or tweaking the struts and tires in Gran Turismo give a beneficial advantage, that experimentation becomes important to survival (or winning a game).  Further refinement of the process becomes easier as you discover new ways to optimize the procedure to maximize chance of success and minimize energy spent and chance of mistakes.  The engagment in the stickiness process leads to a powerful combination of motivational forces that are inherent in gameplay.

Taylan comes to the conclusion

Reach x Engagement x Stickiness
In order to have a succesful marketing campaign with games, you need three components:

1. The game must get in the hands of the audience. If it’s a commercial game, it needs to sell. You can distribute it for free to get the highest degree of reach.
2. It needs to engage the user with your message. Your message needs to be relevant to the game at its core. Absorbing the information should be as closely tied to the game goals as possible.
3. The game needs to be fun. This might make you say “Duh!” but it is surprising how even some commercial games miss that simple target. If it’s not fun enough to keep the user coming back for more, it will hurt the duration of exposure to the message. The brain will not retain the information.

In practical terms, this can be applied to a marketing campaign.  Imagine I’m marketing a game with a new IP.  I need to consider the behavioral aspects of the marketing campaing.

• Who is the target audience for this game?
• What does the target audience expect?
• What existing behaviors do the target audience already have sticked to their brains?
• What are the media consumption habits of this audience?
• Who are the purchasing decision makers for this audience?
• What periferal media and technology does this audience use?

Once I have these behaviors mapped, I’m ready to start the marketing process.  I start the media buying campaign, I develop a free downloadable application for mobile platforms like the Palm Pre or the iPhone.  I develop a microsite and an interconnected eCRM platform for information dissemination and of course, I leverage social networks by creating unique and interesting content to be spread and consumed.

Whenever I’ve started one of these multi-channel campaigns, it feels somewhat like the Cambrian explosion.  Where around 545 million years ago (lasting around 60 million years) life expanded and evolved in multiple directions.  These campaigns take a life of their own.  Looking at the media/ banner conversion and click-through rates… looking at application download rates… looking at YouTube comments, blog posts and other massive information dissemination channels, your campaigns must evolve to adapt to the data.  In essense, natural selection can help you become a smarter, more effective marketer because, as marketers, we know that the campaigns we plan are rarely the campaigns that they become.  It’s the ability to adapt to the pressures by reading the data and then to evolve, iterate and relaunch the campaings to make it successful that can make or break a marketing campaign.

An agile, adaptive and responsive campaign that can address and respond to behavioral pressures, data-supported environmental pressures and a wide array of creative media content to be trimmed down, changed, expanded or re-distributed mimics what we see in evolution, in natural selection and in our own neurophysiology.

I’d like to thank Taylan Kay for this unique perspective, it was a pleasure to read his article and see the confluence of ideas that allowed me to hopefully expand on his post.

Similar Posts:

• Marketing to Gamers: Getting A Gaming Degree
• 5 Critical Strategies for Video Game Marketing (Part 1)
• 5 More Critical Strategies for Video Game Marketing (Part 2)
• 5 Keys to Successful Video Game Marketing from Ayzenberg Group’s Steve Fowler
• The 5 Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns of 2009