I figure now is a good time for a refresher look at the history of marketing,
which is, if you make, distribute or sell a game, an activity in which you
engage. Marketing itself, when you look at it as the process by which a good or
service moves from the producer to the consumer, dates back to ancient times
with much exploration due to seeking new trade routes or access to products.
Columbus’ voyages, for example, were undertaken to find a shorter, and
therefore less costly route, from Europe to southeast Asia. Printed and clay
seals used to consistently identify the
producer of such products as wine and olive oil were used in Mesopotamia as early as the 4th century BCE while
archaeologists have found marks in Pompeii indicating Umbricius
Scauras branded his own fish sauce as early as 35 CE However the term
“marketing” first applied to buying and
selling products during the 16th century CE while the use of the
term in its modern sense first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1884.
Marketing can be divided into three
general areas or eras: production,
selling and consumer and, much like the development of study of marketing, all
took place within the past century
During the production era which ran
from time immemorial until about the 1930s, the focus was on production.
Consumers did not have much choice, nor for that matter did producers. If you
wanted to make a product, you were pretty much limited to what you had on hand.
Similarly, if a customer wanted to buy something, they were generally limited
to a very small or no selection. The
production era can be summed up in Henry Ford’s famous phrase “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black,” which Ford famously said in 1909. The customer had very
little choice or say in what they wanted and had to take what was available
Over time the next few decades,
more producers entered the market (rather like the gaming industry over the
past decade) and the focus shifted from customers having to select and purchase
from the products that producers have available to a more active “selling era”
in which producers, instead of merely making products available to consumers,
actively started selling their products to them. Although advertising and other
forms of promotion existed before this period, their use quadrupled with the
advent of the selling era, as producers competed with each other to get their
products with no consideration as to how well the product met the consumers’
needs. The focus was on mass marketing and selling as much product as possible
to as wide a group of consumers as possible.
Currently we are in the marketing
or consumer era where the focus has shifted to the consumer. Marketing firms
segment and target the consumer, analyzing their wants and needs in order to
make products to satisfy said wants and needs.
Markets are generally much
smaller than in the selling era so less of a given product will sell but the
producer has a much more satisfied consumer who will likely return to purchase
from them again. TCGs are a great
example of products produced with a marketing focus as each TCG alters its
positioning slightly, so that there is not a huge cross over between Magic and
Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh and Force of Will players Yes, there are some players who
will play several different types of TCGs but the overwhelming number stick
with their preferred game and are happy with it. That’s the power of good
marketing.
