The Informed Consumer
Jamey Stegmaier’s article yesterday talked about being an “category nerd”. He focused on himself as a category nerd of board games and the board game industry.
But, the article reminded me of a topic I’ve touched on before and which I first learned from Dave Salisbury’s excellent blog The Quantum Retailer – which is the concept of the cognoscenti.
The Cognoscenti
There are three tiers of board game consumer (with plenty of bleed between them):
The Cognoscenti: Who are the first adopters, back multiple Kickstarters a month, and are well informed about new releases. The hurdle with the cognoscenti is in converting their purchases into time at the table (they have a lot of games to play) and bridging the gap to less niche hobbyists.
The Hobbyists: Who buy regularly – maybe a game a month – are well informed, and thoughtful about their purchasing decisions. They watch reviews, they read blogs, and they have favorite content creators who they trust.
The Casual Hobbyists: Who buy a couple of games a year. Casual hobbyists will trust what’s selling and are more likely to purchase popular games that are already in demand. Conversely, they’re less likely to take a risk with a less-known title.
A good framework to think through board game adoption is to view this consumer segmentation as a waterfall. Generally the cognoscenti are the first adopters. They give a wide berth of games a try and are active on forums – or even have their own content channels (most reviewers are cognoscenti).
A prototype - daily fare for the cognoscenti
Hobbyists are the next tier adopter. They rely on the early reviews of the cognoscenti, Kickstarter news content, or just browsing the site and seeing what is performing well. I would expect them to be the backbone of most board game Kickstarter campaigns.
Casual hobbyists are the last adopters relying on word of mouth, and buzz more so than more dedicated consumers. They might play a game at a café or friends house, and every once in awhile look for a new game to pick up for the family.
Inverted Pyramids
There are exponentially more casual hobbyists than hobbyists, and exponentially more hobbyists than board game cognoscenti.
This is why successful mass-market games sell millions or even tens of millions of copies, while successful hobby games sell low hundreds of thousands, if not tens of thousands of copies.
The challenge of publishing games is transcending down the pyramid into larger consumer segments. Most board game marketing focuses on hobbyists with review campaigns, paid advertising, and engagement on forums.
Some marketing efforts push into more of a casual hobbyist segment with their paid advertising or social media campaigns (TikTok seems especially well suited for this).
In my last post on the subject I talked about our efforts to transcend niche hobbyists.
Make a great game: Mind MGMT is a great example, that if a game is good enough, and novel enough, and reaches a broad enough initial audience – then it can be a success despite some hurdles.
Sell to retail: Many (most) Kickstarters are end consumer focused. This is great for margins, but without retail support, gaming cafes, and people on the floor hand-selling your game, it’s less likely to experience broad success (there are some exceptions). I wrote an article talking a little about the state of retail, with some tips on making a game attractive to retailers. It’s a topic I need to spend more time on.
Encourage your backers to get your game to the table: Without people playing your game, there’ll be no-one to talk about it and no one to evangelize it. There are a lot of ways to support and engage your community during and after fulfillment – reposting gameplay pictures, holding competitions or giveaways, just being present and encouraging people to be involved.
Engage content creators: Post fulfillment is an excellent time to re-engage content creators. A preview campaign will definitionally have limited reach. There are creators who won’t cover pre-publication games, and prototypes are expensive. Sending production copies to reviewers after your game fulfills is a great opportunity to keep people talking about your project.
While I think these tenets hold true – I failed to speak to maybe the most powerful method of getting word out about our games – directly communicating with consumers.
There are a number of ways to reach consumers – they all take effort and some – like paid advertising – cost a not insubstantial amount of money.
Organic Marketing & Target Audience
While organic marketing has always been our primary form of outreach – I’ve been more thoughtful recently around who our target audience is for our outreach, and how we reach and communicate with them.
This blog for instance is targeted at indie publishers. Writing it weekly is a pretty massive time commitment – and I view it more as my way to give back and be a part of the community rather than as a marketing platform.
Sure, people do discover our games through this blog – but it isn’t a particularly high ratio compared to the energy invested in the blog.
I am being more conscious around our marketing on other platforms to be focused on a hobbyist and casual hobbyist consumer segment – rather than the cognoscenti.
In practice this means.
Pivoting our TikTok marketing to be board game consumer focused.
Creating more articles that appeal to games consumers as well as indie publishers – like this article on Magic: The Gathering card cardstock and finishes.
Engaging in more niche games forums that share characteristics with our games (for Sigil this means outreach on abstract strategy games forums).
All of these shifts are on the margin, and of course our strategies and approaches are constantly evolving.
My hope is that by focusing on a more direct consumer segment, coupled with our review campaigns and maybe a touch of paid advertising, we’ll be able to grow our (already healthy) community ahead of our launch of Sigil.
Are you a board game cognoscenti?
