Plan for Jay Moore

For those that know me or are subjected to my advice know that sometimes I tend to look at everything through the multifaceted prism of THE BRAND. It happens to be one of my passions and I believe understanding and leveraging good branding practices is an essential that I don't see independent game developers leveraging to the degree needed to compete in the consumer market.

For as many books and experts as there are on branding there are an equal number of definitions. My own definition is: A Brand is the sum of the experiences and memories a consumer has with a product, its promotion and how well it fulfills expectations set by its marketing."

I can't think of a product category that has a bigger challenge in building new and successful brands than interactive games. First, the gameplay is the essence of the game brand and ultimately determines if the 'brand promise' is met with the consumer (I'll discuss this more when I discuss what I believe to be marketing core competency - expectation management). Studio and Publisher brands are the sum of all the games that consumers identify with those sources - so games themselves have to be the focus of our branding.

If you contemplate the importance of brand building for commercial game developers, from a business and marketing standpoint building strong brands is mission critical to creating long-term success. When I talk with players or developers about games or game franchises that they feel a strong 'loyalty' or 'affinity' toward, its always about the experience of the game. Very rarely is it the result of external marketing (ie movie tie-ins, game PR hype, advertising or even the publisher brand quality) that creates the connection between a game and its consumer. This has important ramifications for independents - while those outside influences are important in building awareness they will not secure a lasting respect and connection between game and consumer. Game brands will be built with great gameplay and game characters.

A simple Google search(a great brand that has huge brand affinity) can turn up a wealth of information on branding - one useful overview comes on a product promotional site for AdCracker This highly simplified list boils down building brands into 3 steps:

Quote:...there are three things you need to understand or create:

> The brand's personality.
> The relationship the brand has with the audience.
> Visual icons, symbols or other representations of the brand such as the logo or a character.

So the three steps to building a brand are:
1) Create a character or personality for the company, the product or service. Just as you would for a real person, based on that brand-person's reputation, attitudes and behavior.
2) Build a relationship with your target market based on that personality. Do this over time, using advertising in addition to all other communications, including the way employees are trained to interact with customers.
3) Reinforce the relationship and trigger recognition with consistent visual symbols. These symbols can include everything from a color scheme and logo to an imaginary character, or even the president of the company.

In future 'blog' entries I want to jump into each of these areas. I confess I'm no more than a student of game design, but I think one of the biggest disconnects in game making & marketing is having branding somehow get disconnected from the game design. Each of these steps is clearly a part of both the design process and the marketing process and I think it deserves further consideration and dialog. And while I am not advocating what has happened with many publishers letting the 'tail wag the dog' with marketing guys driving design decisions - I do think that knowing your customer and building the brand on the essence of the game is part of a designers thought process and flows through into the marketing of the game.

Its one thing to say we're going to build and keep ownership of our IP it is another thing to determine how we will make that IP as valuable as independently possible. Brand building is one place we can get some traction on the how great IP is created.

Edited for Clarity