INSEAD

Where Videogame companies should spend their marketing dollars?

The goal of this project is to have a perspective on potential ways to improve the effectiveness of current marketing strategies of video games developers. To achieve this aim, we will first set out to identify and understand the key factors that influence the buying decision process of a video game (from becoming aware of the product to actually buying it). At this moment, we believe such key factors could include elements such as advertising, review of the games, word-of-mouth, store promotions and placement, and price.

For the first section, we will develop a set of questionnaire targeting specifically the gamers. We will send the questionnaire to the INSEAD community, our friends and popular game chat rooms in order to identify the key factors that affect the buying decision process. We understand that the marketing mix for different genre of games may be different and we will steer the questionnaire towards the following genre of games: stealth action and action adventure.
The analysis of the 2-3 key factors will be based on benchmarking within the industry and across other media industries and products like books, music and DVD. In addition, we will consult extensively on trade journals to find out if any studies have been conducted in the past on such subjects.