Game designers shouldn’t do marketing – but design for it

The best marketing there is, is to design something remarkable in and of itself. That is where marketing starts, and that is the part of marketing that all designers should be very interested in, I argue.

(Glad you are reading; English is not my mother’s tongue so please pardon any mistakes!)

There is an ongoing debate in the board games industry concerning the huge amount of games published, the importance of “hits” and how, as a game designer in an increasingly crowded field, to get your game published/funded.

One recurring question in this debate is if, and to what extent the game designer should be concerned with the marketing of the game, or maybe more generally: To what extent should the designer see the game as a product and not only a game design? I see this discussion pop up again and again in various forums for game designers. I’m not writing this to tell you how things should be done, but to provide my perspective and perhaps get more thoughts going. Having listened to hundreds of hours of board gaming podcasts and after reading countless blog posts, I find the perspective I will dive into here rarely talked about.

Anyway, my take on this situation is the same in the board games industry as it is in all the other industries I’ve come in contact with consulting in marketing and business innovation: the designer of a product should not do marketing, but should design for marketing.

Let’s dive into what this means.

Publishers are increasingly looking for marketing-friendly games and hits

Let’s first look at it from the publisher’s side. I’ll be quoting Nick Bentley (Underdog Games Studios, formerly of Northstar Games) extensively in this post since I love his thinking on board game business and he has touched on this topic previously (and I can’t find many more people who have!). So I want to spotlight and perhaps add to his reasoning. In his post “Board game designers are bad at pitching games to publishers. I can help.” he describes the market situation as follows (this is a couple of years old but it still applies in 2022 from what I can tell):

“Here’s the problem: More than 4000 board games are published annually. Thanks to all that competition, fantastic gameplay is just table stakes. A game also has to be a great product, which means it must satisfy some constraints in addition to fantastic gameplay. Most designers, especially hobby game designers, don’t address the product side in their pitches, or do it poorly.”

He goes on to suggest designers focus on the following two questions when pitching, and really, not only when pitching but when designing the game:

• What is uniquely awesome about this game?
• How will this game become a hit?

He stresses that many designers believe they are addressing the first question, but actually aren’t; they point to a feature that actually isn’t unique and applies to other games as well, or to a unique but banal feature that really isn’t core to the design. As an example of the latter problem Bentley writes:

“…usually some small twist on gameplay that isn’t enough of a head-turner. For example: “It’s a route-making game along the lines of Ticket to Ride but you have to buy easements to make your routes.” – the kind of thing you’d expect to find in expansion or variant of a preexisting game brand. It doesn’t matter if it’s awesome to you, the designer. All the matters is whether it’s awesome to the people who would buy the game.”

This is Bentley’s view and he represents one publisher, but again, I see more and more designers talking about how publisher’s are increasingly thinking along these lines and asking questions that relate more to the product-side of the equation.

Marketing? Designers have a hard enough time designing great games as is!

From the designer side the view is often different. Below I’m quoting a comment on Bentley’s original post which brings forth an argument echoed by several others:

“Market assessment and audience generation are publisher functions, not designer functions. YOU guys are the ones who understand the market and how to position a product to do well in the market. You would be foolish to take the word of a designer as to why their game will be a hit; they’re just guessing, it’s not their area of expertise. And, you don’t want it to become their area of expertise; you want them focused on making great games!”

I absolutely understand this position even though I don’t completely agree with it. I design myself; it is hard. Marketing is a completely separate field – a designer certainly shouldn’t be asked both to be a professional designer and a professional marketer.

There is also definitely a potential slippery slope here if designers would take these cues from publishers as “I need to copy the hits of today and really pander to the audience with my design” (which, in my view, is not at all what this is all about, but the danger is there). Isaac Shalev (game designer, co-host of On Board Games podcast) wrote a reaction piece to Bentley’s post, where he warns against chasing market trends and argues that designing for a “hit” is impossible:

“Bentley is being enormously reductive. Hits are great. Everyone wants to make hits. Publishers, designers and gamers all want hits. A hit like Root can sustain a company for years. A hit like Spirit Island can support a dozen employees. A designer like Vlaada Chvátil can make top-rated games for years, and then a single mass-market hit like Codenames will eclipse them all. […]

But you can’t make hits just by wanting to, and spotting hits is easiest in hindsight. In today’s market, designers are encourages to experiment with new materials, to use expensive or difficult-to-manufacture components, and to create reams of additional content, all to try and create the magical mix of attention-grabbing, immersive and fun gameplay. Yet, many of today’s premium hits would have been rejected out-of-hand a few years ago as impossible to make. Hits from yesteryear, like Pandemic or Love Letter were similarly impossible to predict.”

So: Designers shouldn’t also be marketers, and in addition predicting what will sell is impossible. Agreed and agreed – as long as we define what actually goes into ”marketing”.

Marketing design – a way of thinking to make needs meet?

A possible tool to make these perspectives meet, I believe, is to re-think what goes into “marketing” and practice what I call marketing design. (It definitely relates with what you would call product design, but I find fresh terminology often helps to create fresh thoughts. And product design, I find, casts a wider net and includes many more aspects.)

One of the concepts connected to marketing that has resonated with me the most out of everything I’ve heard and read over the years, comes from marketing strategy-guru Seth Godin. In his book Purple Cow, he argues that the best marketing there is, is a product that by itself stands out. It does the marketing job itself because it is so remarkable. (It is the “purple cow” in a herd of brown, white and black, hence the title of the book).

So the marketing strategist is saying that marketing really isn’t needed, the design of the product is what decides marketing success? Sort of. But this doesn’t make marketers obsolete. Instead marketers should be there from day 1. They should be in on the design itself, Godin argues. I feel like I would like quote the whole book (it’s kind of short, read it!) but here is a passage I love:

“If post-design, post-manufacture marketing is dead, what replaces it? Design. Not the pure design that they teach at Parsons [editor’s note: a design school in New York] but market-centric design that builds the very success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.

The semantics get funky, but the facts are clear. The person with real influence on the success of the product today gets to sit at the table when the original seeds for a project are being sown.

If you are a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer. You’re deadwood.”

This struck home with me when I first read it because it matches my own experience. I started my professional career in 2011 doing marketing but eventually my path led me to service design and innovation, because of this exact reason: the product or service is where marketing actually starts.

You see, as a marketer, I’ve often been hired to help build audiences for brands, deliver a message and hopefully drive sales. Executives sit down and talk at length about how they have a hard time reaching the customers with their amazing thing, and need help. Sometimes classic marketing stuff works, for sure, especially in situations where current practices are objectively lacking. However, more often than not, doing the marketing work leads to insights and to a place down the line where I’ve had to tell these executives that no amount of marketing will solve the core problem: their offering is in some way not matched with the needs of the customers, not quite fit for the market. The customers do not find it nearly as unique and valuable as the company does. Instead of spending more money on marketing, they should be looking at the design of the offering itself and the customer journey.

All marketing starts in the product. If it is remarkable, its marketable. It must be designed for marketing, otherwise the marketing will be a costly uphill battle. You must design to create a Purple Cow.

This is true in all markets, but especially crowded ones where it is hard to get attention. Does that sound like the board game market?

So: What does marketing design actually entail?

Design sneezable games!

The core of practicing marketing design for me, is to design from the ground up knowing that one day, this design is going to become a product or service that will need to find its audience. That requires communication and communication is always a two way street; you cannot design something and be content that you know how great it is and what is unique about it. The million dollar question is: How will this product come across and be understood by the potential audience? Is it actually purple or just another brown cow?

Marketing design means that questions that typically are asked once the marketing campaign is about to start, are asked in the initial part of the design process. Questions such as (and of course not limited to):

• How does this meet an unfilled need in our audience (or meet a need better than competitors do it)?
• How can the value of this product be communicated to and understood by the audience?
• How does this offering distinguish itself from similar ones?
• How would a user of our offering pitch it to another prospective user?

I would like to stress that last one. In Purple Cow Godin talks about “sneezers”, the early adopters of your offering that will talk about it to others and spread the idea (sneezing and spreading it like a virus, is his metaphor; sorry if it’s “too soon!” on that one…). I believe this to be incredibly important; if you do not design a product that fans will sneeze to the next person, you will face an enormous uphill battle marketing wise.

What you believe is amazing about your product is irrelevant

The answers to the above questions, must influence the design itself, no matter the product or service being designed. Because if it turns out you are designing something you think is brilliant, but where the value of which cannot be understood by the audience, then it’s not going to reach people. You have to alter the design. Remember, I’m talking about any type of design here, not just a game; this is true in any product category.

Let’s take an example. Several times I have sat down with start-ups driven by passionate creatives and talented engineers that have a finished product or at least a 1.0 ready to go, and they ask me to help out with marketing. They tell me what’s awesome about the product but have very little in the way of data to prove that this picture is shared by the intended users. So me and my colleagues start with some user interviews and tests to see what customers actually find useful about the product and how they talk about it, to be able to center the marketing strategy around that.

In this situation, in often turns out that what the customer values most (and what the marketing should then center on) really isn’t the focus of the product or service design as it stands. Instead, these founders have put features at the center that they think are awesome, that they know are really cutting edge. But it turns out it really doesn’t translate to value for the customer, or at least not as they perceive it.

And when it comes time to communicate, perception is everything.

If we translate this situation to a board game, you as a designer or publisher might think that this game has a really clever and interesting take on drafting, for example, and you craft your marketing hook around it. However, it turns out that when it’s time for marketing – to communicate the value of the product to the audience – this really doesn’t come across or resonate; to the audience the draft sounds “just like a copy of Sushi Go” for instance, and instead all they see is a typical game about buying and selling [insert good] in the ancient city of [insert city here]. Maybe, if and when people do try it and do sneeze it to friends, it is something else entirely that has grabbed their attention and made the game interesting for them? Or, in a much worse scenario that is all too common: There really wasn’t anything at all that stood out to them. The game isn’t sneezed enough and is then dead in the water.

How could marketing design in practice look like for a game?

To be clear: I have not yet had a game published and only applied marketing design techniques to my own game design process so far. So all of the below are ideas where I take what I’ve learned from service design processes and business innovation and apply it to game design. I cannot provide hard facts as to what works on a grand scale but merely inspire.

First off: This is about more than playtesting. I know every skilled designer playtests, extensively. But playtests are traditionally focused on playing. They test the game and the game systems. If playtesters like a game, that unfortunately doesn’t say anything about the marketing design perspective since the whole context of the situation is completely different and fake. Sure they liked it – but would they have chosen to buy the game at the friendly local game store? Would they even have agreed to simply play it if pitched to them at game night?

Write the pitch on the first design session and perform it. I sketch out the potential pitch in the first design session on a new design. I then read it out loud and then try to inhabit the shoes of a publisher, a jaded gamer or maybe a critic, asking questions along the lines of the above mentioned from Bentley. “How is this different from X or Y? Theme A combined with setting B? Heard that before!” And so on. The marketing design perspective simply becomes another constraint on the design in the early phases, just like you would consider manufacturing costs, playing time and target audience.

Try out ideas with mock-ups. When I’m in the early stage of a design (lets say no more than 10 hours put into theory crafting a game), I want to test out the idea before I spend too much time on it. Again, I do NOT want to do it with an initial playtest because of the reasoning above. Instead, I mock up a box (front and back) for the concept (not professional looking – the context is still that “these are all prototypes I’m working on” – but enough to create a reaction). I will bring a handful of mock-ups to a test session and use classic user interview techniques to gauge reactions. The goal is basically to see how people react to the concept when manifested in a familiar form. Its not a pitch from me where my pitching can help sell it; they are reacting to a fake box, complete with a fake title, mock-up art and copywriting. (This is actually a sort of fun thing to do at a regular gaming night or a playtest session!)

Listen carefully to how the players talk about the game. This is something I’ve found hugely helpful when crafting services. If two users are talking about the service and actually getting the name of a feature wrong, let’s say, then that’s an indication the name of the feature probably needs a re-think. This is sort of the same heuristic as “if players constantly get a rule wrong, consider changing the rule”.

Expand your focus during playtests from just testing mechanisms and systems. Listen to what people react to emotionally, specifically how they talk about the game. That unique drafting mechanism, how do they react to it, talk about it? The same things that you think are cool might not be what hooks them. Use your findings to both change the design, where possible, and to continually evolve the pitch.

Have people pitch the game. A really important one to get a hint concerning the “sneezability”. After every user test of a new service in development, I ask the user “How would you describe what you have seen to a friend?”. Use this question after playtests but tweaked for board games: “How would you describe this game for a friend?”. Listen to what is emphasized, and not. Over and over again. Let this guide your pitch as well as the design.

There are many more techniques that could be applied, especially if you have more resources (if you are a publisher with at least a couple of staff members, let’s say), but let’s stop there for now.

Let’s give games a better chance in the market (or no chance at all)

As Isaac Shalev wrote in the quote above: No one can predict a hit. Of course. What I wholeheartedly believe, is that if you design or publish games where these questions have been part of the process since day 1, it will increase the chances of your game being picked up or funded, and in the end turn out successful in the marketplace. The design will be influenced in a positive direction, in the sense that it will be more attuned to the thinking of the audience. Alternatively: You’ll cancel design earlier when you realize that what you thought was interesting and a great hook, isn’t.

Designing for marketing, is the type of marketing that designers should do. Hand a publisher a design where you can clearly answer these questions (and have some documentation, research and preferably some data from the process to back it up), and they should take it from there and do the rest of the marketing – the actual execution of it.

A warning: It can be hard to be alone in the process when practicing marketing design. It’s tough to switch to the consumer perspective like that, and people are often far too kind to their own designs when they do switch (no matter the type of product). A recommendation is to enlist the help of a friend or someone with marketing or sales experience to ask tough questions from the consumer point of view. If you are a publisher with some money to spend up front, have you marketing people (in-house or consultant) help out with these perspectives early on in the process when talking to designers. It will be a worthwhile investment.

Of course, all of the above presumes that the goal – both for the designer and the publisher – is to achieve success sales-wise. End up with a net profit for the release to get to put out more awesome stuff. Get that glorious buzz, that second and third print runt. I know, of course, that for many the whole process of both designing and publishing is more driven by passion, which leads to more fundamental questions regarding passion vs. professionalism that I asked in the very first post on this blog.

Marketing design does not mean selling out or pandering to the audience. It is just a powerful tool for creating something that is well-designed and valuable in and of itself, and also easy to communicate. Or, as Seth Godin would probably have put it: sneezable.

Now I’m very curious:

Have you tried techniques like these?

What do you think about the whole reasoning, where am I wrong or spot on?

Do you see significant hindrances to practice marketing design in your work as a designer, publisher or other?

Let’s discuss!

/Samuel

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