Grass Roots Player Promotion of CoX
By
Atilla_The_Pun,
Posted on: 2010-12-15 11:42 in Suggestions and Ideas
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Originally Posted by Doctor Vivian
Grassroots marketing campaigns such as actually this cost NCsoft no money.
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| There are no initial costs in the creation of the posters that I don't plan to cover. |
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It seems you're twisting the OP's words to suit your posts. Maybe I am just misreading. All the OP said is a player could make a tiny bit of effort to promote the game. Tiny. I put out the idea of little ad bulletins at your comic shop and maybe theatres. That is all. |
Originally Posted by TwilightPhoenix
No, but it costs someone else money and time. And there's also opportunity costs too. I wasn't speaking about NC specifically, just in general for this whole thing. Now, I'm not saying "Don't do this it's too expensive or x reason here", I just got the general vibe that the whole plan was to "print posters and post them in our neighborhoods or something".
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No, you're right on the money. |
Originally Posted by TheJazMan
Maybe I am just misreading.
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That's all -- a tiny effort.Just to print out and put up some CoH posters at likely venues.
-- Vivian
Im trying to figure out what costs... I understand that if we were to purchase TV ads and what not then yeah it would cost some money...but I was talking about giving a call to local radio stations to just talk about Real World Hero which in and of itself will bring attention to city of Heroes most radio stations will gladly give a plug to a charity since its not going to infringe on any advertisers they currently have... especially now!! and while I may not know the specifics on the ins and outs of advertising, I do know that the more of an audience you reach the more people will see it... we are not worrying about costs since the cost is minimal and we will be successful even if we only get one other person to try the game!!! we are not taking the place of NCsoft marketing we are going to be adding to it ... and my original explanation is correct We do not need to focus our advertising on a specific market...the reason to use a focus group is to save on the cost of advertising...I bet that if NC soft had unlimited funds then they would advertise on more powerful medias. And to a broader audience... the fact is the more people who see your message the more effective the advertising is...if you do not have to worry about cost! which in this case we do not...I mean really the cost of printer paper is minimal at worst... so with my "limited" knowledge of advertising I still maintain that if we advertise for CoX on a broad scale we can effectively increase our population!!!
I do my small part to advertise the game. It's in my signature - all the vids I've made for the game. I've told players they're allowed to repost them in forums or blogs, I've gotten them featured on Massively on more than a few occasions, and yes I've managed to lure players away from WoW or other games.
And sure, while it's free for NCsoft, it wasn't free for me to make them. I did it coz I love the game and the creative challenge (and yes, coz I was hoping to impress them into offering me a job, no such luck). But I love CoH, and I wanted others to see what made it fun.
There have been a few discussions like this - one is Black Pebble's initial "Hello from Paragon Marketing" thread, another was from before that (not sure if it survived the forum move or not).
Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite
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Hi Michelle --
Yes, and great videos they are! I especially like the one that goes from Release to Issue 19, showing the evolution of CoH over time.
Although my suggested marketing efforts have all been aimed at the offline, others also have recommended co-promotion with Real World Heroes and other online CoH-related organizations.
I definitely think that we have a lot of marketing "puzzle pieces" here and there (including your own great videos), not to mention anything that NCsoft has done for the game that might be available for us to use. It's just a matter of putting that puzzle together in a way that it reaches potential players.
-- Vivian
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Hi, Maestro --|
Originally Posted by MaestroMavius
Truth of the matter is. At this point there isn't some huge pool of potential subscribers who just don't know about the game. Lets face it, if you like superheroes and MMOs you know about COX and have probably tried it. Those that fell in love stayed, the others went looking for greener fields.
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If memory serves, Marvel Comics always had a stated mantra when asked why they wouldn't significantly change their content as their fan base grew older, and why they kept recycling plots. Their response was a simple one: that their fan base had not changed, and it was age 6-16.
What they meant, without expressly saying so, was that they felt the bulk of their readership would "grow out" of comics. As they moved on to other interests, they would be replaced by the next generation of avid young readers. New readers to whom the same old recycled plots would no longer be tired, but amazing, fresh and new.
Now, while I believe that policy on the part of Marvel was inherently flawed, and perhaps if they had introduced more mature material they could have prevented much of the fall-away of their readership as they grew into their teens, that's a different matter. The reason I bring it up at all is because new players are constantly emerging on the scene -- ones who have never heard of CoH, much less played it.
It is into that pool of constantly-emerging new players that we must reach in order to help membership numbers climb.
-- Vivian
I have recruited multiple people to CoX, some have stayed and some have not. I've gotten people to renew their subs.
I love this game, it is one of VERY few 3rd generation MMOs on the market today and I will be very unhappy if it goes away, or worse, becomes WoW in spandex.
All the new MMORPGs are dictated to by Suits who can only see WoW and "millions of subs" so the genre fails to advance. All we get is rehashed WoW (trifecta gameplay in fantasy settings) when there is sooooooooooo much more out there.
Check out the Repeat Offenders network of SGs! You'll be glad you did.
As it costs them nothing to advertise, there is no downside to such marketing.
All they have to pay is COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), which varies from the most expensive to NCsoft (boxed product, sold at retail through distributors) to the least expensive/most profitable (direct download of the game client from NCsoft, no boxed product, no retail or distributor margins).
The only costs that the player base would encounter would be minimal, at best -- and would involve the printing on their home laser printer of a few B&W posters. At the usual laser toner and paper cost of about 1 cent per page, that's fairly small potatoes.
Allow me to express my plan more clearly:
I don't want them plopped randomly at all (although random plopping is better than nothing at all) -- but we're not really yet at the point where we would be talking about a Marketing Plan (which would help us a lot to have).
In such a plan, we would have a list of places where the flyers / posters should be placed, and the highest choices on that list would be the places that would have the greatest chance of having interested players read them, such as the above-mentioned Comic Book Stores, Roleplaying Game Shops, etc.
Now, I am inquiring to NCsoft to see if they have any pre-printed posters of this type already sitting around gathering dust or in PDF form. I'll let you know if there are.
-- Vivian