by Reed
Of all the things I experience in my life, women and marketing are the two subjects I’m always learning more about everyday. Marketing is unpredictable and always evolving, while women have a complex infrastructure that even they can’t understand at times. When you try to market games to those women, everything becomes even more unstable and unpredictable.
Some games are easier to market than others because there are essentially three types of female gamers:
- The Legit Gamer, who plays all the top games and is probably better than you at every one of them.
- The Social Gamer, who enjoys games like Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Mario Party, or pretty much any Nintendo game that they can play within a group or social setting.
- The Fitness Gamer, who only uses video games to get in shape (we won’t worry about the fitness gamer for now).
So what should we, as marketers, do to slowly turn those social gamers into legit gamers? I think its pretty simple; market those top games as social games.
This is something I’ve been pondering since a conversation I had with my 14 year-old niece on Christmas. After hearing about the different clothes and make-up that she got, she also mentioned that she got some video games. When I asked her which ones, she replied with ‘Dance Central 2′, ‘Just Dance 3′ and ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3′. Now I can understand the two dance games because she is a 14 year-old, girly-girl, social gamer. But why would she want MW3? I prodded a bit more, and found out that reason why she wanted it is because that’s what her friends are playing. She’s only playing for the social aspect of it.
This is exactly how Activision is advertising the series — as a social game. Take one look at their current commercial, titled The Vet and the nOOb, and you’ll see what I mean. Sure, each COD game has a great single player campaign but the real jewel is found in the online multi-player. This obviously won’t work on every game that gets released because some games don’t provide online content. As for first person shooters (FPS), it seems like a good way to try and grab a different crowd of gamers (that they may not have had before). It sure has worked for Activision and the COD series, and apparently it has worked on a group of 14 year-old girls.
