Marketing IS Creativity

On Friday, Stew Hogarth kicked off a debate on Twitter. It focused on whether product or marketing was more important, with Stew making an impassioned case that if you don’t have any money, the product is the ONLY tool that you have at your disposal. After a lengthy discussion with the likes of Brian Baglow, Colin Anderson, George Bray and Amanda Porelli, Stew wrote up his thoughts in a blog post entitled When you have no PR / marketing budget, the Product MUST be right….

The three key points were:

Point three is where I disagree with Stew. And I disagree at a totally fundamental level.

Marketing is about understanding your customers

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as:

“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”

Note that there is no mention of spending money, of TV adverts or massive campaigns. The core skill of marketing is understanding your customers.

That doesn’t seem unlike the core skill of a game developer.

In the fabulous Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell says:

“The most important skill for a game designer is listening.”

He goes further, and says that a game designer must list to Team, Audience, Game, Client and Self. That’s a lot of listening.

And the heart of that listening is to identify, anticipate and satisfying customer requirements.

Game designers and developers may say “It’s all about the creativity, man”, and I get that.

But creativity that focuses on making something that no-one wants to play is self-indulgent twaddle. If you are a game developer who doesn’t have at least one eye firmly fixed on your audience, you are not a game developer.

You’re a hobbyist.

Marketing does not mean advertising

Just because you have no marketing budget, does not mean you don’t need marketing. The spending of money is the least skilful, least value-added part of the marketing function.

I mean any muppet could spend $1 million on some TV ads, a few magazine spreads and the usual web suspects like Eurogamer and IGN right.

The key skill of marketing is to identify the absolute essence of your product that will persuade customers to buy it, it is not about throwing money at media placements.

As Patrick O’Luanaigh, former creative director of Eidos and now CEO of nDreams says in his book Game Design Complete :

“You must have a hook. You must be able to summarize what makes your game idea distinctive in a sentence.”

Is finding the hook a marketing skill or a creative skill?

There is no distinction between product and marketing

This is my biggest point. Product development IS marketing. They are both about finding the essence of a consumer need and giving it to them.

In the case of a game (as opposed to a widget, a toothpaste or a car), that need can be pretty nebulous. It might be to be:

In fact, for games, the list is nearly endless. Usually, the key creative idea comes not from what the market wants, but from what the creator wants to create.

That’s fine. It’s great that a creator wants to make something that will challenge, entertain, reward or, even better, leave the user changed in some positive way as a result of experiencing their game.

But to do that without an eye on the audience is madness. Few, if any, creators don’t give a shit about their audience.

And if they do give a shit about their audience, they’re thinking like marketers.

Sorry, Stew, I think you’re wrong

It’s not that I disagree with your three points, per se.

It’s that I disagree with your definition. Marketing IS product development. Marketing IS creativity. Marketing IS a vital skill for every game maker.

Whether they like it or not.