Marketing of an open source game

Defining your product and message

Here is a proposed marketing strategy for any product, but in particular we can use it for open source games so we will look at those for examples.

• Understand the market
• Understand your position in the market
• What is the product and why is it different or better
• One unique selling point which is stronger than the rest combined
• One clear concise message to consumers
• All marketing reinforcing that message

The aim is to make it very easy for consumers to understand what your product is and why they should use it.

One unique selling point, one Big Idea

With a great product with many benefits it is tempting to brag as much as possible about the myriad benefits but for clear consistent marketing just ONE unique selling point should be chosen, one message which is stronger, clearer, more powerful, than the rest.

Example: Marauroa game engine.

• The market is game or tool developers
• The position is an open source engine that is game agnostic and runs on any platform
• The differentiator is KISS - keep it simple stupid
• The message is that Marauroa's game engine is built on the KISS principle

That was the hard part. Here comes the fun bit.

Now we can build great marketing material. The key concept is simplicity, derived from our KISS message.

So the website should be simple, clean. Design themes should be clean lines, lots of white space, no clutter, basic direct language.

Technical blogs or white papers should explain why a simple approach works.

Each new feature being released should refer back to the basic principle of KISS to reinforce the message.

The branding - logo, images and fonts - should be simple.

This is just a toy example and KISS may not be the best differentiator for Marauroa. Certainly, the existing website, marketing and releases news likely don't reinforce the message at every stage. But can you see how powerful it would be, if they did?

To extend the example, if Marauroa had been the first free engine or first Java based engine, say, then the strongest differentiator is more obvious. The message would be related to being free, or using Java (say) and the marketing would all build on that.

Example; Dove soap

• The market is women, check: was there an age range?
• The position in the market is to be a luxury soap
• The differentiator is to be a moisturising soap (no others existed or marketed themselves on this at the time)
• The message was Only Dove soap contains 1/4 moisturising cream

The packaging and advertising campaigns all reinforced this message. It is a clear and simple message but very powerful. It is so clear that it was easy to see why this product was different and the advertising campaign was hugely successful.

Worked example: Stendhal game

TODO: We need to work out the things above - market, position, differentiator, etc. There will be more than one option, of course, and we will have to choose the best. Create a space for working through that and recording the process in this document.

References

TODO: add references that kymara has collected while learning the theory