Market segmentation as you know it has become more complicated today than ever before. Capturing data in CRM systems, doing primary research, etc. all help, but the ways of segmenting we’ve learned don’t allow you to see your customers in their natural space. Sure, sales, marketing and customer service teams capture a lot of information, but is it insightful? Is it useful in understanding the segment? Or is it just what ‘they heard’ and made a note of? 

There is a lot of hype around social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., but the fact remains that social media (as a concept) is the first time that organizations have ever been able to see, listen to and get to know their customers in public spaces. Social interactions tend to be natural and not forced, which often leads to deeper insights.

Let’s look at all of the “-graphics” to get a better understanding of segmentation and how segmentation has changed. 

Demographics & Firmographics

Ah, demographics and firmographics…the marketers tried and true methods of slicing and dicing their markets. We know them well, don’t we?! They were drilled into our heads as marketing majors and have stuck with us through the years as the best practice for market segmentation.

But the days of mass marketing have come to an end and it doesn’t make sense to segment markets only to treat them as if they all live, think and buy the same way.

As you know, demographics allow B2C marketers divvy up their markets by size, age, income, education, ethnicity, etc. and firmographics allow B2B marketers to manage their markets based on employee size, revenue size, industry, number of locations, etc.

Does looking at someone’s income really provide an indication of how, where, when or why they part with their paycheck? Does knowing a business buyer’s revenue size tell you exactly how they manage their budgets or what types but products/services are purchased? No and no. Demographics and firmographics truly leave marketers empty handed when trying to get a deep understanding of markets.

So what’s a marketer to do in order to get deeper insights into their market in order to segment them properly? If demographics and firmographics are all you are using, consider adding psychographics, sociographics and ethnographics to the mix.

Psychographics

Want to know what your customers’ values, attitudes and lifestyles (VALs) are? Then psychographics should be a part of your segmentation mix. While psychographics have been around for quite some time, they often aren’t used to their full potential. While the VALs segmentation seems strongly linked to B2C marketing, it’s important for B2B marketers need to understand is that just because someone is buying in a business situation it doesn’t mean that they don’t have certain attitudes or values when it comes to products and services (i.e. “I want the best bang for my budget!”). It is smart and safe to assume that many consumers carry their VALs with them into the office. But, is psychographics even enough to really know your customers?

Sociographics

If you are looking for the ability to connect with your customers at a level much deeper than demographics, firmographics or psychographics, consider sociographics. Sociographics allow marketers to relate to customers as individuals. Remember one-to-one marketing of yesteryear? It was a great concept and made CRM systems very popular. But today, social media plays an important concept in marketing. By social media, I don’t mean using tools like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, communities, etc. but the two-way conversations these tools allow for. As you get to know customers online, you’ll be able to determine their individual values, attitudes, friends, hobbies, passions, who influences them and more. Essentially, sociographics allow you to discover what makes your customers really tick.

[Image: Stefano Maggi]

Ethnographics

What is ethnography? Basically, it’s about understanding your market’s everyday life where they live it and from an insider’s point of view. Meaning, you understand the market because you view them in their natural settings. Take for example, Graco’s marketing and social media team A lot of them are moms and as such they can relate and market to moms because they understand the needs/wants moms have. Social media, again, is one way to understand the common values, lifestyles, hobbies, values, needs, etc. that drive people to join communities and forums of like interests. Typically these types of online groups have their own culture, speak in terms that are unique to the group, and they often help or influence each other to make purchasing decisions. Relating to your market in this manner allows you to seamlessly blend in with it. 

[Image: Gina Zacharias]

What’s The Answer?

Marketers have more tools than ever at their disposal these days. Between CRM systems and social media monitoring tools, marketers can gain a lot of insights into their markets. With social media being still so new for many organizations, it will take time to truly understand the shift from demographics and firmographics to sociographics and ethnographics. The key here is to understand that it will take a lot of time, roll-up-the-sleeves hard work, patience, strategic savvy and management. You can’t buy a list that tells you this data and you surely should just jump off the plank. Your starting point should be audience research analysis and training on how to properly engage customers in their surroundings. Once you have that down, the next steps will be finding tools and determining a strategy to pull it all together in a manner that provides a valid return.

Your thoughts? How has social media affected how you do market segmentation for your B2C or B2B customers?

When I started researching this post it was a little guy… errrr… pigeon against the big, nasty telecom company. I wanted to tell a story about how this poor little call center firm turned a liability into a strength. But after researching it, I’m not sure I can tell that story anymore.

Here’s what happened:

Employees at The Unlimited, a call center firm in South Africa, regularly transfer large amounts of data from satellite locations to their home office for backup. These backups often take a rather long time, prompting one employee to quip that a carrier pigeon could do it faster. Pigeon Race 2009 was born, complete with a small social media campaign (a twitter account, a blog, a contest for naming the pigeon, a few videos and a second contest for predicting the winner and time).

Here are the rules of the race as set at pigeonrace2009.co.za

1. No Cats allowed
2. The same amount of data will be sent on the landline and via the pigeon, on a SD card ( 4 gigabytes)
3. The race is from Howick to Hillcrest
4. The Pigeon flys from Howick to Gillits, and then will be transported via car to the finish site ( where the landline data will arrive)
5. The day will be announced closer to the time
6. Birdseed must not have any performance enhancing seeds within.
7. Data is not to be compressed.

They held the race on 09/09/09. Winston completed his journey in a little over an hour. It then took another hour to upload the data to the destination computer. By that time they had completed 4% of the upload from their satellite office. Here’s the BBC’s coverage.

That’s mind boggling. How could a pigeon beat their ADSL that badly? Sure we have far better speeds here in the US but 4%? That works out to approximately 176Kbps. Which isn’t audaciously horrible, but not quite the up to 512Kbps their connection touts.

What interests me too is that it took an hour to upload 4 GB to their own system. That’s about 9.1Mbps. That’s a snail’s pace for uploads from a memory card to your local computer. That’s slower than USB 1.1’s 12Mbps rate and a far cry from USB 2.0’s 320Mbps effective rate. I have no idea what their technical setup is, but if it takes an hour to transfer the data locally, I can at least better understand why it would only hit 4% in a little over two hours from off site.

But what was Telkom’s response? In short: it wasn’t our fault. Now at first, I sneered at this reply. “Yeah sure it wasn’t,” I thought, “it’s not your fault that a pigeon can beat your data rates?” but then I read their full response, and read through some of the discussion board on mybroadband.co.za (It’s pretty much Telkom hating until you get to about post #10). And I’m not so sure that Telkom is completely to blame. It feels in some ways like The Unlimited stacked the deck against them. Yet at the same time 4% of 4 Gigs in 2 hours is far from ideal.

So in the end I’m not sure what to think.

Telkom definitely earns points though for their Winston Edition Broadband Service.

Could The Unlimited have set up a more fair and scientific race? Absolutely. Could Telkom work on providing better and cheaper services
to their customers? If the number of Telkom haters that I’ve found on the web can be believed, then yes.

Both companies, however, did do something right. They both tried to take a liability and turn it into a strength.

I leave the “winner” and the company in the “right” up to you. What do you think? Is there clearly a company in the “right” and one in the “wrong”?

Recently my husband and I joined a boating club. I can’t tell you how great it has been.  If you are thinking of buying a boat, I recommend re-thinking that idea and looking into Freedom Boat Club.  You show up, the boat is ready for you, clean and full of gas.  You take it out for a few hours and just return it.  No hassle of towing the boat back home or cleaning the boat, etc.  You get the picture.

For the past few weekends we’ve gone out on the boat.  Being a nice guy, my husband has been ‘captain’ each time, allowing me to hang out on the bow (front) of the boat, enjoy a few cocktails and get some sun, while he responsibly drank bottled water and drove the boat.

I knew at some point I have to actually learn to drive the boat.  Although I passed the online boating course, I had not ever driven a boat.  Not being the best (car) driver, I was not so excited to learn how to drive the boat.  This was largely because many vacationers who rent a pontoon boat or jet ski don’t have to know anything about the boating rules and regulations.  So driving a boat is a much more proactive, defensive experience than driving a car.

But to be fair I had to learn.  Suffice to say this past weekend was not my favorite boating experience or my finest moment.  Paying attention to the other boaters, trying to prepare for and then react to their actions is a LOT of work.

Take one example, the wake.  In my previous, front of the boat experience wake made the ride fun.  My only concern was to make sure the cocktail was in the cup-holder so my drink didn’t spill.   My ‘at the helm’ example was completely different – slow down if I was going too fast so I wouldn’t flip the boat (probably wouldn’t have happened, but in my mind it was a possibility), steer into the wake (what?) and then speed up to get through it as the boat shook and bounced from side to side.  To me that feeling was completely out of control.  The ‘going fast as the boat shakes from side to side’ was fun while lounging comfortably on the front of the boat.  The experience at the wheel, terrifying!

But I will, in time, get better and more comfortable with driving the boat.  And even become able to take the boat out myself with friends.  It definitely will be worth it.

Now how does that long story relate to analytics?  Many companies are still in front of the boat mode with their analytics.  Each month the marketers present a powerpoint with their web reports – visits, unique visits, year over year or quarter over quarter, and maybe some revenue (revenue that if you compared to actual sales data was not even close).  Everyone left the meeting happy since the lines on the charts were slightly larger and the trends were moving in positive direction, even if ever so slightly, or if there was a bad month, everyone understood, the economy is bad.

But effective marketers drive the boat.  It is scary.  It takes time and work.  But the results are worth it.  These data-driven companies excel at using information from their web analytics, teaming it with actual sales and maybe even competitive information and creating a plan that is fluid.  They analyze what is working and what is not.  If they can’t fix the ‘what is not’ they stop spending on those campaigns and move their budget to what is working.

Their presentations go beyond simple metrics.  They explain their results in business terms that executives can understand and appreciate.  They get bigger budgets (and even raises…even in this bad economy).

So what is it going to take to get you off the bow and behind the wheel?

So I’m sure you’ve seen those ads for losing weight if you “Obey 1 simple rule”

I’m honestly not sure how anyone believes that these two women are the same person.  In any case if you didn’t realize they were a scam, Please read all about them on CNN and also take a look at what Oprah and Rachel Ray had to say about their supposed affiliation.

What interests me however is how the ads have changed. They take the original ads and “stamp” them with an “Acai Berry Diet exposed” graphic (see below right). Then lead them to a “consumer Report” site like news15tv.com of “WSVT-TV New York” that’s curiously “not affiliated with any news publication.” “Jill Rivers,” an “investigative reporter” is doing a series called “Diet Trends: A look at America’s Top Diets” where they “examine consumer tips for dieting during a recession.” She found out the “truth” about Acai diets. Most of them are scams, but, Jill reports, this other Acai Berry diet is totally reputable and totally worked for me. Don’t trust these scam sites. Trust Jill Rivers the investigative, non-partial reporter.

To attempt to add to its authenticity the site grabs a weather widget from Accuweather.com, displays embedded YouTube videos of several actual news sites talking at least briefly about Acai Berry diets, and waves a whole bunch of logos at you. And of course adds heartfelt comments from people who were skeptical, but have now seen the light.  Unfortunately the comments “have been closed due to spam.”  My favorites are the one from “Marco” who’s concerned about fitting into his wedding dress, and from Thomas who says, “Hey Jill, i just signed up and added you to my Twitter, cant wait to share my progress. thanks again, Amy xoxoxo”  Thomas seems to be very affectionate when Amy takes over.

I think it “legally” meets the criteria of showing itself as an advertisement, because it has the word “advertisement” in the header, but so small that no one will notice it (I know I missed it at first). And the page ends with a whole bunch of legalese saying that they’re not actually affiliated with and their actions aren’t condoned by any of the news organizations whose logos appear on their site.

Despite the horrors of deception and wanton abuse of all human decency, I think there’s a lot to learn here.

I’m obviously not advocating you set up a fake site (newsy or otherwise) that tricks people into believing you’re more reputable than you are.

What peaks my interest is how these Scamming spammers (Scpammers?) have listened to the prevailing winds of the community and not only changed their tactics, but flipped it on its head. How do you gain credibility when everyone thinks you’re a liar? Well if you’re a liar you lie some more by creating a fake news site and duping the unsuspecting public into believing that your product is reputable while all the others are scams.

If you’re not a liar, you listen to what the community says and take a long hard look at your product and your company and work your butt off to try to regain the community’s respect. There are two things that should be in common between these Scpammers and your company.

1. That you listen to your customers and potential customers. If you flick them off or ignore them, no one wins. They lose a great product/service and you lose a group of customers that have already shown themselves to be rather vocal and influential.
2. That you turn bad PR/comments/reviews into a win for yourself. This usually means hard choices and hearing things you’d rather not, but everyone, you and your customer, will be better for it.

So obey one simple rule: Listen to your customers (and that’s no scpam).

UPDATE: Acai Berry Diet Exposed image changed to a version with the same women as the first image.

UPDATE2: Oprah has filed a lawsuit against some of these marketers

One of the biggest misnomers in social media, and attempting to market to communities in social media, is that it’s entirely free. This notion comes from the “free” price tag that goes along with signing up for accounts on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t cost you one cent from your bank account to open a basic account on these sites.

There are costs involved when you are considering entering into the social media space; the kind of costs that you don’t immediately pull out of your wallet to pay for. Since these costs are not immediate, the illusion that marketing efforts in social media cost less becomes even greater for companies looking for cheaper solutions to reaching their audiences.

Your Employees’ Time is Valuable

What a lot of companies neglect to figure into the larger picture is how much it costs them in time and resources of employees, tools and equipment. While it may be free to sign up for the account, the real cost comes with your employees maintaining those accounts and keeping them active in the social communities. Just creating the profiles and leaving them there doesn’t mean you are automatically going to gain a foothold in a social media community.

It takes time and serious effort to engage and truly interact with a community, and in order to do that  you first have to figure out which communities you need to be active in. That takes a lot of resources to start with, doing the due diligence of intense research. From there you formulate your strategy, again another tax on your employees’ time. Then its figuring out just how much of their time needs to be spent engaging and interacting with the community.

While Tools Can Be Free, They Could End Up Costing You In The End

From a tools perspective you need to both monitor and measure. While some tools might be free, such as Google Analytics and Google Alerts, there still is a cost of your employees’ time. Also, the free tools do have a limit of scope and you might find out later that its costing you much more by not having invested in the more expensive tools.

Monitoring tools like Radian6, Meltwater and TrackUR can give you better insight into monitoring your brand and related terms, but at a cost. Measuring tools like ClearSaleing and CoreMetrics can help you gauge how your efforts are affecting your bottom line in finer detail than most free tools.

So when you are hearing all the hype about Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and how these wonderful “Free” tools are helping companies reach new people every day, stop and take a step back away from the hype. Ask yourself, “How many man hours did it take that team to attain that success with the social media site?”  and  “How much time went into research and planning?”. Ask yourself, “How are they measuring success?”. Then ask yourself the final question, “Is it really free?”.

MediaWeek says mobile advertising is delivering some surprising results. According to a recent survey of 1800 mobile users, 53% click ads, 24% make purchases directly from their smartphones and 35% request more information or a coupon.

Why the sudden shift? Iphones have made the mobile experience satisfying, which means users are accessing the mobile internet more and downloading apps. The rest of the industry is mimicking the Iphone, trying to catch up, which is leading to more competitive products and services and creating more demand.

The Kelsey Group predicts that by 2013, local mobile ad revenue will reach more than 3.`1 billion, up from $160 million in 2008. Mobile search gets the biggest peice of that pie, at 2.3 billion.

Marketers should expect increasingly sophisticated mobile opportunities over the coming months. Yahoo for example plans to allow advertisers to tailor their ads to the location of mobile phone users, enabling local business to advertise only to people within their area.

I’m in Beijing at the moment and just saw an advertisement recruiting journalists who are native English speakers. CCTV, the English-language 24-hour news channel of China Central Television is actively seeking journalists who are native English speakers. Interested journalists should email their resumes to jobscctvinternational@gmail.com.

I find it odd that in the land of Baidu, the largest national TV network has a gmail account. On the other hand, it was CCTV who first reported that Baidu used fraudulent pay-per-click ads as its search results, for which Baidu apologized (“We put too much effort in competing technically with Google, and in doing so overlooked our advertising system and its management.”)

By the way, the origin of Baidu’s name is pretty cool. It comes from a poem comparing “the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one’s dream while confronted by life’s many obstacles…’hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood’.”

So, you want to build a game, but all of that coding and leg work sounds too much like… well… work. Isn’t there another option?

The answer is a qualified “Yes.”

You’ve heard of this thing called “open source” which many penny-pinchers translate as free. While this is not the place for a deep discussion on what open source is or is not, one thing that must be remembered is that when you work with open source, you should honor the ideals of the original programmers.

Please either release your revisions with a similar license (whether or not you can release it with a different license is a question for a lawyer) and/or make significant contributions to the community whose work you are building upon.  A corporation/business taking open source code and repackaging it as their own is the antithesis of the open source movement (and possibly illegal). These are people, honor their contribution.

That being said, building on an open source game can keep you from reinventing the wheel. Even so, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

The greatest failing I have found in most open source programs is usability. Most of the time, programmers will program for programmers and will focus on functionality rather than usability.

This is great in that you can find a program like Gimp that has 90% (or more) of the functionality of Photoshop without the thousand dollar price tag. The down-side is that the interface isn’t very intuitive and can be really hard to use (particularly for someone who has no graphics editing experience).

Most of the open source games that I downloaded and played while researching this blog had great graphics and horrible gameplay and/or a poor user experience.

A Note About Me: The following reviews/thoughts will be tainted by three factors (at least).

1. I have a Mac so I only looked at games that would work on Mac (not all that rare considering it’s usually easier to port a Linux-based game to OSX than to Windows).
2. I have a fundamental belief that I, as a player, should not have to work to play a game. I can work while playing a game, but not in order to actually play.
3. I only have seven fingers. (This sounds like a joke but it’s true. I only bring it up because it affects my ability to hit certain key combinations. And, just because you’re wondering, the story involves a bar fight, a ninja, and an ancient prophecy).

N.B. I found all of these games using Wikipedia’s list of open source games.

Super Tux Kart: This Mario Kart style game was by far the best game I downloaded and the one that I often decided needed more “research.” I wasn’t a huge fan of the left-handed controls, but that’s probably more my lack of fingers than a fault of the game. Graphics –  were on the whole -pretty good although many of the tracks are textured with repeated and low-quality patterns.

Nexuiz: This multiplayer first-person shooter had some of the best graphics, but I’ve never felt more “pwned” than by the “easy” bots who riddled my character with bullets and various projectiles during the training level. I don’t tend to be a fps man, but I’ve held my own on Halo and its first sequel (no, not on Legendary). This felt overly hard to me, but I’m not 13 anymore with endless time to learn how to misspell “owned.” The controls were less than responsive and were difficult to use (especially for me).

Project: Starfighter This 2D shoot ‘em up had pretty good graphics, and an in-depth story.  But, the way they forced you to watch slow animations made me hate the game before I even played it. Gameplay was ok, but difficulty in precisely navigating the ship made it less fun than I wanted it to be.

Yo Frankie I’m not even sure what kind of game to call this. It has pretty good 3D graphics and a world you can walk around in, but little to no gameplay and lasts about as long as a blueberry pie in front of my Aunt Bertha. Load times are horrendous and there’s no explanation as to what you’re doing or why. This was probably built as a starting platform so that users could build levels and fill out the content (at least that’s what I’m hoping). They are in the midst of a level design contest.  But, from what I can tell there’s no overarching goal of putting out a “complete” game.

Which brings me back to the “qualified” of qualified Yes. If you want to use open source to give you a jump start on creating your game, great!   But, you must realize that there will still be a lot of work in developing a story, refining gameplay, creating graphics that are appropriate, and making the game something you’re ready to present to the world.

That said, using an established game engine might give you more time to focus on those things rather than starting from scratch and building every part of the game.

A word to the wise, taking an open source game, slapping your logo on it, and calling it done is worse than creating no game at all. In so doing, you’ll anger the programmers who made it, and – depending upon the game’s usability – you may also frustrate your customers/potential customers.  Please don’t do this.

Happy gaming and beware of skin sores!

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to making successful games.  But, here are a few of the pitfalls to watch out for. Make sure you do a lot of testing, particularly in your target demographic because the last thing you want to do is create a game…

…that isn’t fun. Well, duh! Then, why make a game? No game designer ever sets out to make a game that’s as fun as watching linoleum curl, but it does happen. Sometimes, it’s from too many features, sometimes too few, sometimes it’s poor art direction, sometimes it’s a poor scoring system or recharge system, or saving system, or some minuscule, insignificant thing that annoys the heck out of the player.

Whatever takes them out of the game world or frustrates them as a side effect of playing the game (frustration as a direct result of game play i.e. “That Boss is so darn hard!” can be a good thing, in moderation) will kill the fun and your profits.

…that isn’t playable. If the controls to fire your weapon is “Press F1 while holding down X for one shot or V for rapid fire then hold down Y for normal bullets Q for hollow bullets and W for radio active bullets,” that would be enough – but, you probably also have to move while shooting. Make sure your controls are easy to use, intuitive, and if it will be played on the computer, easily reachable. The easier it is to play the more often people will do it, particularly for casual games. A higher end game will require a more sophisticated control system with more options, but ease of use is still the name of the game.

…that isn’t consistent. You should have a logical progression of levels, power ups, enemies, gameplay, etc.  Each level should feel like a part of the larger game (unless you’re making something like WarioWare where moving around randomly from one mini-game to the next is the point).

Each level should be a slightly different with slightly more difficult variation of the level before or there should be a pattern/story progression to levels that vary wildly from the “normal” game play – e.g. every third level is a vehicle level or the last level on each “world” is a certain type while all the others are the same type of gameplay.

This will allow the player to get a feel for how the game works and enjoy mastering more difficult variations. Otherwise, it feels like you’re thrown into a room full of Sproogly Wishum. What the heck is that, you ask? I don’t know either and neither will the player.

…that’s too hard. If you make the game too hard no player will want to play it. If only 10% of players make it past the first level, then…90% of your audience isn’t engaged long enough to care about your game, let alone your product.

…that’s too easy. If even a two-year-old can play your game, twenty-five-year-olds won’t be engaged very long, unless you can somehow make it addictive. If your audience is two-year-olds, however, then you’re probably on the right track.

The first few levels should be fairly easy as people get a grasp on how the game works. The game should then increase in difficulty until only the most expert/time-devoted players can get past each level. Think of Tetris on the original NES (That’s Nintendo Entertainment System (TM) for you marketers who never had a childhood or had one before 1985.)

It had a very simple concept: make complete line. But, as the levels got higher and higher, the irregular blocks came faster and faster until most people could not flip the blocks fast enough and filled the screen to their geometric doom. (My personal best on the NES Tetris was 199 lines. Yes, I’m still proud of that. No, I don’t care how many you got on X implementation of it unless you beat me on the NES version, and then, I’ll probably cry.)

…who’s tone doesn’t fit the company or the audience. A Toddler game probably wouldn’t go over well for Rolex, nor would a Gothic Horror game be the next big thing for the over-50 set. So, make sure the tone both fits the company image you wish to portray and will be appealing to the audience you’re targeting.

…that’s one big advertisement. An advertisement in game form won’t win you any awards nor will it engender any goodwill from your clients. In fact, it’ll do more harm than good. Yes, there are companies that are testing in-game advertising but …

A. No one’s come up with a good model for it yet and B. Those marketers are building upon a gaming “infrastructure” that’s already in place. If you’re building that infrastructure, you don’t want to throw an advertisement at your house of cards. The whole thing will tumble down. You’ll have thrown money away AND angered a large percentage of those people who played your game and might have become new, loyal customers.

As you embark upon this brave new world, may you always remember one thing: you can lead a gamer to water, but you can’t make him take a shower, unless, maybe, you happen to be his mother. (Even then, it’s a crap shoot.)

In any case, Happy Gaming!

So, you’ve decided to create a video game.  What do you do now?  How do you get started?

The decisions you make here can make or break your game.  At the same time –  this is a process.  If you treat it like an experiment (which it is), you’ll be able to make changes as development goes along and seek the best possible game/user experience rather than succumbing to other, perhaps monetary, factors.

Don’t get me wrong.  You should never throw money at a problem.  You just end up with money out of your hand and all over the floor.  But, you should also never decide to use an element/ingredient just because it costs a lot of money.  If the gargantuan-ly expensive element detracts from user experience and thereby the game overall, it will discourage users from the game and your product/service.  You’ll lose more money keeping it in than if you dropped it in the first place.

At the end of this grand experiment, you’ll either have invented the light bulb or learned something almost more important: how a light bulb doesn’t work.  Here are just a few of the decisions you’ll need to make on your journey towards play-marketing (as I like to call it):

1. Audience.  Just because you have a large audience for your product/service doesn’t mean you need to include all of them.  Just because you have a small audience for your product doesn’t mean you need to limit the game to their demographic.  Choose an audience that you want to target and build the game around them.  “Everyone” is not an option.  It’ll be much easier if you’re more specific, but you don’t need to say “women between 30 and 35 with cats named Stella.”  Hey, if that’s your audience great, but something too specific may be limiting to your creative process.

Once you’ve chosen your audience, learn about them.  Find out what they like and dislike and how you can better make a game that they will enjoy.  A gothic horror game probably wouldn’t go over well with the Hannah Montana-obsessed tween crowd.

2. Genre.  Many people like to hold their nose up and say, “My game transcends mere Genre.”  That may be true, but I feel the genres exist for a reason.  We should definitely try to break out of genres with new and interesting games/books/movies/stories, but it’s the true artist who creates a new genre without telling anyone.

If you’ve already got an idea that doesn’t fit neatly into a genre, great!  Go ahead and pursue it.  But if you’re strapped for ideas and don’t have the next flOw up your sleeve, it’s best to just pick the genre you feel would appeal most to your audience.

3. Tone.  Although many genres have a built in tone, putting a new spin on the genre by using a different tone e.g. a World War II comedy or a dark puzzle game could help set you apart from the crowd.  Sean of the Dead, for instance, mixed zombie and comedy to a moviegoer’s delight.  Don’t make this choice lightly.  A comedy WWII game done poorly could at best not create any interest, but it could also offend veterans and military personnel in general.

4. Gameplay.  Determine how the game will be played.  Is it a 2D side scroller, is it a 3D shooter, is it a click-and-match puzzle game?  How will the user interact with your game?  This covers both the buttons a user pushes as well as how the character/avatar/block/thing reacts on screen.

Of all the decisions you make, this is probably the most important decision because it is the crux of the game.  Your game would not be a “game” without it.  A great concept with awesome graphics and a good story will fail if the gameplay is clunky or difficult.  A mediocre concept with mediocre graphics and a mediocre story that has great and interesting gameplay will do much better.

5. Platform.  Choosing a platform often will come down to money.  If you have gobs of money you might want to consider one of the high end platforms like the Wii, Xbox 360, or Playstation 3.  But then, you also have to deal with game publishers and many other headaches.  Other platforms like the iPhone, Flash, or Silverlight have a much lower cost of entry.  Your choice of platform will help determine your revenue stream i.e. if you can monetize the game directly (probably inadvisable) or use advertising/licensing to defray costs or simply give it away as a freebie.  It can also determine development costs, and will most of all determine where and how your game will be viewed and played.

6. Goals.  Set realistic, measurable goals for how you (and your boss, and his/her boss) will classify this experiment as a success or failure.  Do you want to increase traffic to your site?  Do you want direct revenue?  What does your boss want?  Answering these questions on the front end will save lots of headaches (and possibly your job).

So, go ahead and get started making your game.  If nothing else…Solitaire can now be classified as “Research.”