Go to an emotional level

When faced with promoting your game, it’s easy to focus most the attention on its features. Most games will have some better features over the competition and it is clearly important to recognise these. Better or more innovative graphics, mechanics, weapons, story etc. are all strong selling points, but these can be quickly beaten by other titles.

There is usually an opportunity to understand the target audience on an emotional level. This is not to say that your game’s messaging should heavily feature it, but it’s highly useful to have it as a starting point for your thinking.

Marketing to tweens (9-12 year olds) is a good example of this. Looking at this audience on the surface might lead us to think that they are mostly motivated by crazes and celebrities. This view isn’t wrong, but it’s superficial.

Both of these aspects may be understood on a deeper level. Crazes and celebrities might be casually explained away as being ‘cool’, ‘trendy’ and ‘fashionable’, but they can also be viewed as being based in deeper insecurities and desire for social acceptance.

A campaign that starts from this emotional understanding will have a much higher chance of being relevant and creative. Starting from, ‘tweens love collecting’, on the other hand will likely result in old ideas.

How do you get to this level? Mark Pollard sums it up best:
“Start with something that seems obvious and keep asking ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’.”