Marketing of Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 44

Unfortunately—for the understanding of the marketing of video
games—marketing tends to be confused with promotion. As this confusion
creates misconceptions of both of these concepts, and their applications, a
clarifi cation is thus deserved before proceeding. Marketing is defi ned by
the American Marketing Association (AMA) as “an organizational func-
tion and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering
value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that
benefi t the organization and its stakeholders.” 3 This defi nition implies that
marketing is a process for creating goods and services that have value for a
customer. Any production process, from a traditional marketing perspec-
tive, should therefore start with the customer as his/her needs. For video
games this would mean developing games based on market research on
customer preferences for the intended segment. But, as argued by Colbert
(2007, 13), compared to traditional products, in culture and the arts the
“traditional marketing model cannot adequately refl ect the reality of the
artistic milieu.” The consequence is that marketing of culture has a stron-
ger emphasis on the product itself and the consumers are made part of the
development at a later stage. And as video games should be considered
cultural products there could be a potential mismatch between traditional
marketing and video games.
Promotion (mix), on the other hand, is defi ned by the AMA as the “vari-
ous communication techniques such as advertising, personal selling, sales pro-
motion, and public relations/product publicity available to a marketer that are
combined to achieve specifi c goals.” Promotion is part of a marketing process
and serves to communicate with a customer about a product or service that
has already been produced. This part of marketing is what we most times
come across as advertising. Although we must keep in mind that what we see,
as customers, is only a limited part of a company's marketing process.
Historically, of course, games have been mass marketed. That is, they
tended to be brought to market on the basis of what developers thought
would be interesting to gamers. In this volume Dymek suggests that games
are still developed for “hardcore” gamers. 4 As we are putting this chapter
together, the industry is gearing up for the Christmas season 2011. Activi-
sion Blizzard's Call of Duty and Electronic Art's Battlefi eld are expected to
fi ercely battle for the attention of this segment (Woo and Sherr 2011), which
would seemingly support his observation. On the other hand, it is only
recently that developers have taken a segmentation approach and sought to
satisfy segments wants and needs. In this regard, a demographic approach
is available for gift-givers in this holiday season (Molina and Snider 2011).
For kids, for instance, there is Sesame Street: Once upon a Monster and
Super Mario: 3D Land . For tweens, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
and Forza Motorsport 4 ; teens get Batman: Arkham City and Uncharted
Three: Drakes Deception ; the two battlefi eld games are slated for adults,
as well as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim . Finally, a casual games segment has