By Jonathan Salem Baskin
Games are being marketed as a great hope for the future of branding.
You can find mainstream consumer products placed in console videogames, as well as ads on virtual billboards and ringtones on virtual mobile phones. Corporate reps have recurring roles in ARGs (alternate reality games), and everyone from oil brands to non-profits is sponsoring entire games for consumers to "play the issues." Games are a way for consumers to engage with brands. A growing field of utilization is calledadvergaming, and lots of agencies are telling their corporate clients that brands need to do things with games.
I think they've got it backwards: games need to do things to brands.
 I wrote about this in the November issue of the UK's Brand Strategymagazine. Here's my spiel, though:
Video games are incomprehensibly immersive. Human beings might very
well have a genetic predisposition to become very attached to them,
something that's just shy of addiction or love. We’re talking intense
involvement here, and the sort of involvement that passes every test of
legitimacy.
People give video games their time, often lots of it, and over long
stretches. They keep coming back, in spite of any number of more
important influences in their lives. They're willing to spend money on
video games, from equipment and software to Internet bandwidth and
subscriptions.
We know how to build these things.
And yet we choose to twist games to support our old ideas about
brands? Brands shouldn't use game tactics...rather, shouldn't brand
(and business) strategies get configured like games?
Marketers mistakenly see games as a lowest-common-denominator channel,
instead of realizing that games are not channels at all, but rather
places, like social media, only with a purpose. Games are models of
places where people live, worlds that have rules, roles, expected
behaviors, and even dimensions of time. Perhaps most important, video
games are places where people go to do things. Games are built upon
creative ideas, but they’re experienced with behavior.
The latest branding model for gaming takes none of this into account,
any more than it cares about behavior or the particulars of place in
the real world. The intense reality of the relationship that players
have with games like Halo makes the imaginary relationships we presume
people have with consumer brand names seem absurd.
There's a tremendous upside to thinking about games in a new way.
If actions matter, and consumers define brand by their behavior and
their communities, games could provide a model for understanding how
those behaviors connect. Structuring brands using game components could
yield relevance, purpose, sticky involvement, and repeat visits, among
other qualities. It could change everything, from how we map new
product launches (never educating or announcing, but rather involving),
to customer service (configuring engagement so it's truly rewarding,
not just a chore).
Games could get us thinking about brands as behaviors.
And, in tough economic times like ours, I can't imagine a company
contemplating a 2009 branding budget that includes games without
considering the implications of behavioral reality.
I explore the implications of the brand is behavior approach in my
book,Branding Only Works On Cattle, with a detailed exploration of the
specifics of how, when, and why game thinking could make brand and
marketing decisions more effective and efficient.
In a chapter entitled "Games As Purpose, Not Distraction," I look
forward at what's possible.
Jonathan Salem Baskin will be speaking at the Game Conference on June 11, 16.30 - 17.30 hours.
|
