If you ask the typical employee of a game developer or publisher what a ?community manager? does, most of the time you?ll get a pretty solid answer. Community managers are ?the online face of our game,? or ?the folks responsible for communicating with our audience and channeling their feedback back to the development teams,? or ?our voice and ears with our consumers.? They live on Twitter and Facebook and company/game message boards, and sometimes have public personalities. It?s not unusual to see community managers involved in discussions with design teams, and it?s also not unusual to see designers seek out the assistance of community managers when there?s a burning question requiring consumer feedback.
If you ask that same employee what ?marketing research? or ?consumer insights? is about, you?ll have less luck. We do ?concept testing? or ?test ads and packaging? or ?market segmentation,? whatever that is about. You know, marketing stuff. These are generalizations, of course, but sometimes a stereotype is based on fact. For many game companies, marketing is the tail of the dog?and marketing research is the fluffy bit at the tip of the tail.
It?s nice to see such significant investments in community management, for it?s widely known (assumed?) that the consumers who show up on your message board are the same people that contribute to fan sites and other Internet caves. Ignoring the most passionate tip of the pyramid of fans only invites criticism and ?negative buzz.? There?s a very wide range of game-specific communities, from the legions of World of Warcraft fansites (100+ just on this one index) to the Halo community to sites devoted to Nintendo?s Mario franchise. Most of these communities are self-organizing: they gather seeds from game publishers which can be used to ?plant? fan sites, with templates, artwork, and other assets.
All of this work emanates from the PR and community management wings. ?Consumer insights? is not involved, for the loyal game fan is also widely believed to be allergic to anything that smells of Marketing. Gaming enthusiasts can be extremely passionate and, well, noisy in their public expressions of brand loyalty.
So noisy, in fact, that it typically drowns out the quieter mumbles of the average gamer, the mass market, and the casual consumer?the segments of your audience that generate 95% of your sales. Community management excels at responding to the needs of the noisy, but simply cannot distinguish between fan feedback and market feedback. For the latter, there?s?well, there?s marketing research.
Consumer insights and marketing research professionals in our industry are severely outnumbered by community managers and PR teams. It?s the way things are. We must constantly challenge ourselves to provide actionable value to internal clients that share the same marketing allergy as our consumers?for after all, our best designers and artists are passionate gamers themselves.
Here?s the short list of what people want:
- Focus groups with franchise loyalists, former customers, and gamers in demographic profiles that match the target audience for a particular title.
- Deep playtesting sessions with individual users.
- Market sizing for particular game genres, platforms, and business models.
The first two items are ?tactical? research to improve an existing product. The third item is ?strategic? to the degree it allows organizations to make better-informed product portfolio decisions. (For example, now is probably not the best time to begin developing a mature first-person-shooter for the Nintendo Wii.) Many areas of potentially valuable research are simply not on the short list. That doesn?t mean they don?t happen, but their audience is rarely the development studio.
This distance between consumer insights research and product development is a lost opportunity for everyone involved. While listening to ?the community? is better than not listening to anyone at all, it also severely skews perspective about what?s really going on. Forums and blogs tend to have a ?me too? mentality ? one negative comment from one person tends to stir the pot and attract dozens of echoes. Community managers ring alarm bells, and the leadership reacts to what can easily be a tempest in a tea pot.
What is needed is coordination between researchers and community managers. Research professionals apply scientific methodology and rigor, and are able to place the qualitative feedback from ?the community? into properly weighted perspective. The business of game development has much to gain by
- leveraging communities for brainstorming and idea synthesis,
- involving research in the process of vetting those ideas, and
- integrating research into decision-making processes to the same degree currently enjoyed by community management.
Marketing research need not be confined to pricing studies (which rarely happen in games anyway), package testing, or marketing segmentation. And community management is not the only ?voice of the customer.?
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Analyst, researcher, gamer, casual writer, even more casual photographer, and generally nice guy...Source: http://gamehex.com/2011/09/21/community-management-vs-consumer-research/
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