The standard phrase goes "You are what you eat." but I think you could easily change that to "You are what you study." One of the reasons I say this is because my majors were advertising and management at Uni and I desperately tried to run away from them with admin and teaching jobs. Yet, no matter where I went I could not escape analyzing management practices at work nor contemplating advertising copy whilst waiting for my wife in a shopping centre. It was as if my brain had an automatic sub-routine hardwired into it that would naturally kick in the moment a marketer or sales person started to engage in a meaningful discussion about what products I truly 'needed'.
Having been an advertising enthusiast and then an actually marketing / sales practitioner at my last job, I was sure that I had already been scared by the worst of advertising out there. Then I started browsing the app store on itunes to assess the competition. I was glad that I was sitting down at the time.
For this post, I'll list just four of the things that I found odd about the way products were marketed.
#1 in Finland, Zimbabwe and another country you may have never been to.
Being #1 is a big thing and a great marketing tool. We've all seen ads on TV where they mention how this product has been huge in another market and therefore will be huge in yours. This is basic marketing by association and is a solid idea, the problem occurs when the association makes no sense. For example, an ad might say "#1 in America" when advertising in Australia and that's understandable, Australians listen to and like a lot of American music. Therefore when you say that, I might think "Oh, I'll probably like this then."
However, what if the same ad said "#1 in Casablanca." A disconnect happens. In fact, it might damage the product because the viewer starts to consciously process the comment. Firstly, they don't know a lot about Casablanca and they probably don't even know if they've listened to any music from there. Suddenly, you're asking them to take a risk. "I might not like Casablanca music" their mind might argue "I would waste my money. Perhaps I should try it first on youtube?"
Secondly, and even worse, they could become suspicious. "Why only Casablanca? Isn't it popular anywhere else? How big is Casablanca's music market?" They become aware that it's an advertising ploy, that you are trying to manipulate their decision. The best copy is never registered as advertising, it's absorbed and acted upon through impulse. You have probably lost a customer and worse, encouraged them to share how ridiculous your product is (without even trying it).
New great features.... Coming soon (On product release)!
If the previous one was bad (but based on a sound principal), this is just plain horrible. I'm not even sure what crosses their mind when they write these sorts of things. I assume their argument goes like this "People will know we're behind the product 100% and we will reward their purchase with additional content."
There are many implied and immediate problems with this, so I'll break it down piece by piece.
The product is not complete. - This is the biggest statement you are making. You released the product early because your budget ran out and / or your deadline occurred. If it sells well, then you can add additional functionality which should have been in there in the first place. This is quite demeaning because you are admitting that you made a mistake somewhere in development and expect the customer to be ignorant or gullible enough to help you fix it. Not a good start.
Does not reward early adopters - Early adopters are the ones who take the biggest risk. They spend their own money and time on an unknown product to see if it's any good. These customers are the ones that should be more rewarded than the late adopters. Yet, you're rewarding procrastinators. This secondary group of people will hear about the product from the adopters and be able to buy it for the same price but get even more functionality. They take less risk yet get additional benefits. In fact, they might even get the social reward of sharing something new with the early adopter because of a new game mode, decreasing the benefits an early adopter gains from the risk taken.
Encourages late purchases - There's a Dilbert strip which depicts a sales rep coming back from a meeting with a prominent vendor and telling Dilbert "I just told one of our vendors about all the great features our upgrade would have and they got really excited. Now they don't want to buy our current version, but the upgrade. How long it will take to get ready?", Dilbert replies "Two years." (Paraphrased)
Perhaps the time periods have changed but the issues are the same. What benefit can you gain from promoting a product that's even better than the one you have? Why would they want the current one? Worse, you've just told all your competitors what you think would make great additions to that type of game and they implement those in their games too. (Maybe even faster).
To bring the example down to earth, let's look at what would happen if we applied this logic to a physical retail product. Say we went to JB-Hi Fi and wanted to buy the new version of Office. It's been out for 2 months and you're quite excited about all the new features it has. When you get there, the helpful retailer starts discussing its great features but then adds "Well, it's good. But I've heard that in six months, they're going to release a premium edition. It's for the same price but also has database management software, a financial accounting program and instant voice recognition."
What would happen to sales of the current version? What do you think is happening to the sales of your current version? You've may have spent weeks on marketing your new version just to undermine the value of your product at the checkout.
The mile long read
This is the most common and although it's not the worst, it's still pretty bad as these things go. I believe the reason for this stems back to who studies advertising and writes copy for it. At Uni, I met a lot of story tellers, people who wanted to be writers but did an advertising major because it's difficult to achieve success as a published author. (Yes, I was one of those too. Can't you tell from the size of these posts? :) ) For me, this was a huge issue at Uni. I would write so many words on the copy that you could barely see the poster. I truly believed that my copy was great and that by including all this information I was assisting the customer. They were well informed.
Fortunately, my lecturers took my notes and mutilated all the pretty words until there was nothing left except what the customer wanted to read. Eventually I learned (very slowly and painfully) that I had to shrink everything till it was easy to understand and quick to read. Then review, review, review. Then shrink again.
Now imagine if I hadn't had that experience but landed a writing gig at a small gaming / publishing company? Of course my job is going to include ad copy and press released but I'm still in explanation mode. I think features and value are the same thing and so type away quite happily believing that I'm doing the customer a favour.
Reality is vastly different. People are always busy and even if they're empirically not, they will tell you they are. (How else do forums about games magically fill up when everyone's at work or school?) Plus, they only want the information they believe they need. Nothing else. So the idea is to be as short as humanly possible and for it to be as simple as possible. They don't want an essay, they want something that assists them.
On the iphone / ipod this is even more important because the screen is so small. A 100 words can feel like a trek through a 1,000 word review on a computer. It's also why Twitter is so popular. Short, immediate and powerful.
So there's no excuse in today's world. Yet the copy I read for some games on the store is long, tedious and over complicated. It tells you everything and I mean everything about the game. It tells you about its 63 features (even though people probably only want to know about the top 3 - 4) and how to play (despite it being explained during play) or sometimes embarks on a quest to tell you about how you'll help revolutionize the industry.
Let's use a metaphor. Imagine I told you everything about a movie. The story, the cast, the behind the scenes activities, the uniqueness of its feel and the emotions you should feel during key scenes. Why would you see the movie? More importantly, I've just stripped away all your ability to 'self discover' these things. So there's no mystery left when watching said movie. Nothing to find for yourself. I've actually removed some of the experiences you can obtain from the movie.
They don't do it for movies, music or art. Don't do it for your games.
Today's final - Support local independent game developers
I saw this a few days ago and then had a 'grumpy ad man session' in which I ranted to everyone within earshot (my cat) about how dumb this is. This is not a feature or benefit. It may be a selling point but only to those who actively and aggressively do not purchase mainstream titles but prefer their titles from smaller and more independent companies. That market, however, is normally quite small.
For this section I'm going to assume that you would like your game to sell well and have no (real) intention of staying a small developer over the long term. When you write those words, you are writing them to try and increase sales for your game by appealing to the positive cultural value of 'helping the little guy'. Question: If you do achieve a strong commercial success, will you still care about these supporters? Think about it because your brand (and the perception the community at large has of it) can hinge around what you do after achieving success.
Anyways, one of the problems with this approach is that it takes away from your game. You're putting the emphasis on 'helping independent developers' as the reason to buy the game instead of 'its an incredible experience and you'll love it!'. Say someone purchases your game because of this reason, would they say: "Oh, this game is incredible?" or "It's pretty good for an independent developer."
You see the difference? One statement says that it's good, period. The other states, it's automatically not as good as a published company. If that mindset starts to seep in, you can never get rid of it. Your games (no matter how good they are) will always be second class in the customer's mind. They are buying them to 'do you a favour' instead of buying them because 'they want to'.
When money gets tight or time limited, your games will end up being ignored simply because they believe that they've 'helped you enough'. Also, consumer's can start to believe that they should have control over your company. After all, you exist only because of them (true) and their generosity (not true). Make what I want / charge what I want or I will stop supporting you.
No matter how big or small you are, we're all competing on the same playing field as much larger / smaller companies. Your game has to be equal or better than what is on the market. Saying "I've only got 1 programmer and two cats, that's why it looks suspicious." is not an answer consumers will wear (yes, even for free games).
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Well, those are four of my pet gripes about ad copy on the iOS store. I'll probably have more in the future as Ahasai Designs continues and I'll let you know what they are. But from one marketer to another, see you next ad break!
徒羅藩
P.S: You can follow us on Twitter @AhasaiDesigns
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