First Impact Marketing

Will Hounsell & Sam Hayman

Marketing Aims:To promote awareness for the game.Build hype for the game.Expand potential audience for the game.

Target Audience:Our target audience are young people aged 14-30, we suspect most of our audience will be made up of males aged 14-20, we believe this because the when we got people to give feedback on our game; the male demographic was more positive.

Our game will definitely not attract the same audience Call of Duty does; we won’t have that mass of diverse players from different countries, age, gender, ethnicity, etc. Our game will appeal to a less mainstream audience, a more indie audience, perhaps someone who would read a magazine such as Little White Lies.

Potential competition

From this venn diagram, it is clear that there are two games in particular that are direct competition to our game, those games

are Alien Hominid & Pitiri 1977

Marketing Segmentation

Marketing Segmentation (cont.)

First Impact Player Market Segmentation Breakdown

We decided not to include Socializers in our pie-chart

because we believe the game does not include much of a

social aspect; it isn’t the kind of game someone would brag their score about to their friends and isn’t a very competitive game.

We have added the “Killers” to our chart as an estimate of how many players would be under this category if we included some kind of score systems.

Achievers: Focus on winning, rank, and direct peer-to-peer competition. They are engaged by leader boards and ranks. Killers: Focus on attaining status and achieving preset goals quickly and/or completely.They are engaged by achievements, either determined by the game or themselves.Explorers: Focus on exploring and a drive to discover the unknown. These players may end up knowing how the game works and behaves better than the game creators themselves.Socializers: Focus on socializing and a drive to develop a network of friends and contacts. They help to spread knowledge and a human feel, and are often involved in the community aspectof the game.

We made four drafts for my logo utilising different colours to see what contrasted the best against the alien head, my favorite is the blue as the pixelation also looks the best, the gradient also works well with the light blue up in the left corner, leading downinto a dark blue in the bottom right.

We found it hard to choose between the blue one and the purple one; we liked the purple one simply for it’s colour and how it looked with a gradient, however, due to it being so dark in the bottom right hand corner, we had to move the “First Impact” logo, which doesn’t fit with the previously set designs, because of this we choose the blue one.

Four drafts for app icon

Comparison to actual products.

Posters

How do the final designs fit with our aims & audience?

I believe our final designs fit with our aims and audience quite well, this is because they all offer a different way of advertising the game, and our overall aim is to promote the game, create hype, and an audience/fan-base. The voucher works well because it is a subtle way of advertising the game with a bonus (free download code), Starbucks is also a very popular cafe, so it is obviously going to receive a lot of customers, and thus, a lot of vouchers will be given out with their food/drink. Starbucks also attracts the same type of audience that our game would; young and perhaps indie.

The hoody works well as it is for a niche audiences type, and there’s nothing about it that specifically shouts “this is from a game”, it is purely for hardcore fans that will understand the reference.

The posters fit really well within our science fiction design they utilize aspects from the design of the game itself as well as realistic images. These designs are loud enough and easy to remember for the viewer to be interested in them.

Marketing Campaign Plan

29th August -Twitter Campaign Launched

We are starting the Twitter campaign on this date because it’s is perfectly positioned after the ‘hype’ of the GAMESCON and before the ‘hype’ of the TOKYO GAME SHOW. This will allow us to create a decent sized audience and receive feedback on the game.

By using Twitter we can gain useful feedback on our game, as Twitter is a very powerful and popular means of social networking. Using the hashtag “EGX” will also make sure our tweet(s) are seen.

Social Demographics

From this demographic, most social network users are between 18-44, this works with our target audience as our game is aimed at anyone over the age of 14, another reason this works is because this is the prime age for users of social networking websites, so our inclusion of Twitter in our plan will definitely work.

This statistic states that most retweets comes from tweets with photos, this is why we are tweeting a picture of the poster on the day it goes up; it will gain more retweets, which in turn will create more more hype and awareness for our game.

From these statistics we can see that it is better to make a tweet later on in the afternoon on Wednesdays and Thursdays, this is ideal for two reasons: the first is we are releasing our game on a Thursday, the day of the week the App Store refreshes, the other reason is because on that day we will be making a tweet asking for feedback inthe afternoon/evening, this way we can get the most feedback,

Twitter Statistics

11th September - Posters Go Up

We are releasing the posters to build the excitement of the game before the it’s debut at EGX, we can also promote the Twitter campaign here.

25th Sep - EGX Game & Merchandise release

25th of September: Release of Game At EGX – We are releasing it on this date because it is a Thursday, on Thursdays the apple store changes it’s editorial round, studies have shown this is the best day to release a new app on the apple store. As it’s also the first day of EGX we are able to show our game off to the crowd at the exhibition. We will also notify more people of our Twitter page and posters.We are also releasing the merchandise on this date because it’s the release of the game and as we will be at EGX we can sell them to the passing public. T-Shirts will sell better than anything else as it’s not quite cold enough at this time of year for hoodies to be in demand, the T-Shirt will also be sold at Vans, which means it well sell a lot.

These products will be used and handed out at our EGX 2014 booth.

25th Sep - EGX Game & Merchandise release

Our EGX Job Role Lanyards

EGX Gaming Booth Setup

11th Oct - Vouchers at Starbucks

We are releasing the promotional vouchers on this day because it will be after the excitement for our game has died down and as it’s also the first day of the Play Expo we can start building the excitement back up. This works because our game is being released at the end of summer, when it’s still fairly warm weather, so people will naturally be more dehydrated and want a drink, this increases the chance of the going to Starbucks and buying a drink and getting the voucher. Our voucher will also have an advertisement on it stating you can get 10% off the official “Fist Impact” t-shirt.

11th Oct - Play Expo Voucher release

These vouchers work the same way the Starbucks one, except you obviously don’t need to buy something in order to obtain one, they are simply given out at play.

Thank you for listening.