

Ask HN: Are marketing problems like technical/design problems? - bsaunder

I'm a programmer.  My co-founder is a designer.  Through the course of developing our product we expect to encounter many technical and design problems.  I'm quite confident in our ability to solve those.  While I don't know any of the specifics of the technical problems we will yet encounter, I know the gamut of what I've done in the past, and feel most of these are just a matter of time and effort (lots of effort some times) to solve.   My greatest fear, is developing/designing a good/great product having no one show up.  I have no idea how to solve a marketing problem.  I have a hunch that it's also just a matter of time and effort.  Are there people out there that view marketing problems from a similar perspective as I view technical problems: for a good/great product it's just time and effort to acquire customers through marketing, or do some good products seem to fail for unknown reasons despite good marketing?<p>As a sub-note, our product is a game with an advertising/in-game purchase revenue model.
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cschwarm
I assume you meant promotion; the term marketing usually includes product
(design), price, placement (ie. distribution) and promotion.

Making marketing decisions is basically the same thing as making any decision:
You need to determine your goal, identify barriers you need to overcome in
order to reach that goal, and then execute.

The difference to technical decision is identifying the barriers. With
technical problems, the relevant cause of the barrier, namely the object or
software, is under your control and easy to alter. It's also easy to measure
the effects of any change. Thus, identifying barriers is rather easy.

With promotional decisions, the cause of the barrier is basically the market,
that is: some group of people. They are not under your control, altering their
behavior is usually very hard, and measurement is an art form since you often
don't know who they are. Therefore, identifying the relevant barriers is often
a mix of experience, intuition, and guesswork.

Of course, there are lists of common barriers (ie. causes why people don't buy
or buy elsewhere) and for each of them, there are common methods to overcome
(or answer) these.

For example, a game is a typical experience good: you can only judge the value
after having played (and payed for) the game. Thus, mistrust is a likely
barrier to overcome. Typical answers are offering a trial, a demo or a
guarantee, setting the price to zero, etc. -- the "low commitment" route. A
different route could be using "high-reward" signals: promoting the (high)
production costs, setting a rather high price, producing high-quality in-game
videos, buying TV time for ads, offering trials to only selected journalists,
etc.

As you can see from the example, money may be a necessary ingredient,
sometimes lots of it. Thus, promotion is also a function of the price (or
rather, the revenue model).

However, since you seem to go the "low commitment" route, already, your
central problem will be "selection": Why play your game instead of one of the
million others?

A common answer is "relating" or "bounding" -- appeal to something a target
audience wants to be (or thinks it is). For example, Listerine's 'Always a
bridesmaid, never a bride' appealed to what the audience wanted to be (namely
someone's wife). Marlboro's 'Come to Marlboro country' appealed to freedom and
independence. So, another ingredient is creativity, so to say.

If you have that, your promotion only needs to communicate this particular
trait. The rest is finding out what people do, view or read who should be
interested in this particular trait and go for it.

Then, you really just need time and effort to promote your product
successfully.

Hope this helps.

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bsaunder
Thanks, that's very helpful, sounds like we'll need to brush up on promotion.
You sound rather well versed in this, thanks a bunch for taking the time to
write such a thorough relpy.

