My research focuses on launch and branding strategies for new products. An interesting practice about marketing games is how existing brands are being used for new games. This, so called, “brand extension strategy” entails that a game is build around a brand from a different product category (like Viva World Cup). We investigated what branding strategies game developing companies use, especially whether they use existing brands or develop entirely new brands and use existing characters from different context. We evaluated success of these games, commercially and according to experts and peers and analyzed them to find out what works and what doesn’t work. An important aspect is the concept of “fit”. In marketing, it stands for the perceived link and logical connection between the product and the brand releasing it to the market. A good product-brand fit ensures a more successful launch.

Even though, the intended purpose of persuasive games the behavioral change benefit (rather than pleasure per se), marketing and branding could be just as important, helping to increase the use of these games. In my experience, the main reasons new products success or fail are particularly different across product categories or industries and many products fail for the same reasons, like excessive complexity, lack of originality, bad timing or wrong price to quality ratio. However, there are many other aspects in which marketing can play a role. It is important to be able to increase product acceptance and ensure that the market will adopt these products. An aspect very close to game world – transportation (as called in marketing) is a very powerful tool to get more reliable feedback, even when product is not developed yet. Increasing the immersion, also at the design stage, is an often overlooked possibility.

text by Malgorzata Pawlak