Monday, May 4, 2015

Konami Konfuses Yet Again



Next weekend is the Sneak Peek for the new Yu Gi Oh release, Crossed Souls (which is rather a cool name for anything, much less a card set). Also on that same weekend, though, is the latest Konami sponsored Demo Day for Yu Gi Oh.

 For those not familiar with Konami Demo Days, they are designed to encourage current players to bring in a new player by offering a play mat and a bonus to the new player.  It doesn’t usually work that way in practice since Yu Gi Oh play groups are pretty limited and not great about recruiting fresh players. What’s strange about the choice of marketing strategy here is running two marquee events on the same day. 

 Generally what this produces is what marketers call cannibalization. The traffic that the Sneak Peek generates is the same traffic that the Demo Day event would pull in. You are not creating new traffic or pulling people  in on a different day. Instead, Konami is spending perfectly good money to pull people in to the Demo Day that would have come in for the Sneak Peek, blunting the effect of both events on one day and forgoing the opportunity to use one as a draw for another day. Maybe Konami has a subtle marketing plan here but I don’t see it.

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