

Customer outrage as a marketing strategy in the app store. - amichail

I'm thinking of marketing my upcoming DropZap 2 game using customer outrage.<p>In particular, I could order the countries where DropZap 2 will be released based on how good they are as places to live.  I could use official and highly respected ranking(s) to do this.<p>I could then release DropZap 2 in the app store to a new country every week based on this ranking.<p>In a way, this would imitate the initial exclusiveness of Facebook.<p>Would this be a good idea? Would it get much attention?
======
QuantumGood
It wasn't exclusivity as much as an optimized network effect that benefited
Facebook. The same thing happened with MySpace initially.

Smaller networks generate a network effect
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect>) more quickly because it takes
fewer joiners to reach a critical mass of community. That's how exclusivity
benefited Facebook—once several dozen people from a university are on the same
network, it begins to be beneficial for others to join.

MySpace rolled over some of the network of a previously existing group of
music lovers. Essentially, they started with a critical mass of community.
Unless your app adds multi-player options, or you have some kind of reward
marketing scheme that benefits referrals or community, this wouldn't really
apply to your marketing.

If you want to create a kind of brand exclusivity and assist your marketing,
try some kind of scarcity marketing. For example, give early adopters some
kind of additional benefits, and then advertise that only a limited number of
additional memberships for those benefits are available.

That doesn't mean you have a unworkable idea. If you create a good PR hook for
your limited strategy rollout, you could attention from it. But you need a
strong PR layer on top of the concept.

