Once a boxer becomes a champion, he must now defend his title. The fight never ends.
In my last blog post I talked about my thoughts on what defined a successful product. In summary, I thought that a great product needed to be appreciated by its target market, and that the product needed the exposure to reach that market.
This post will define the other half of the battle: sustaining your success.
So you have a great product. Your fans are willing to throw money at you to keep making great things. Your product is being mentioned in online circles, promoted through word-of-mouth, and all is going well. There’s only one problem.
The world never sits still.
Whoever currently enjoys your product will eventually get tired. Newer, cooler things will roll out, and new technologies will render your product obsolete. Your fans will eventually become complacent and you’re bound to need to roll out something new-but what?
This is where paying attention to your customer pays off.
In eMarketing, we discussed the concept of the conversation prism. This convoluted diagram essentially lists all the different mediums where an online community can discuss, or observe, your brand.
In my opinion, diagrams are useless unless they help explain something or suggest new methods of working. This diagram does both. First of all, it explains where your product *could* potentially be talked about. This includes places like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. By going around the circle, you can identify all the different sources for ideas from your very own customers.
Remember my definition of a “good product” in part 1 of this post? “A great product is anything that is perceived to be attractive by the target market. That is all.” What does this mean? This means that the customer is king.
A lot of business students I talk to say that it’s in a firm’s best interest to “maintain an ongoing relationship with its customers.” When I ask them about it, they reply “so that they can keep making money off of loyal customers.”
I like to look at it a little differently. A firm keeps a lasting relationship with its customers so that it can, or should, pick up ideas. Oddly enough, I talked about this a year ago in my post “Listen to your consumers!” and I’m reiterating the same message now.
This title of this blog post is “Sustaining Greatness in Gaming” because I believe that great game developers listen to the feedback of its players. I keep tabs on popular trading card games and online MMORPGs/MOBAs, and although the problems differ one thing always stays the same: the players want the developers to listen.
Let’s go back to discussing FTL: Faster Than Light. The developers for the game are currently hosting an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) on Reddit along with some other awesome dame developers. Here, they directly answer the questions of their players and create hype for new products. In particular, they’re getting feedback on what’s cool (or not) in their games. This is essentially free, painless market research.
These are the top posts in the comment thread. If I were the marketing manager for Subset Games, I’d be taking a lot of notes from this thread. We have people voicing their opinions on the product, creating new ideas for future releases, and doing all of this absolutely free. This is a gold mine of information, and it would be foolish to disregard these comments.
However, what’s very interesting is the response of the developers. “While we have some minor stuff in the works […] it’s unlikely that we’ll be jumping on to a sequel.” What does this mean? To me, this simply means that they’re going to release something new. Something different. Rather than staking all of their success on one given product, they’re going to expand their portfolio to include other games as well. This is a great move as far as strategy goes, and there is only one piece of advice I’d give to the developers:
Make sure you listen to the players.
It’ll be hard to live up to FTL, but if you’re great at inspiring joy in consumers (e.g. PopCap Games, creator of Insaniquarium and Plants vs. Zombies) you’ll likely create another fabulous product. And that will sustain your success.
So what is a successful firm? I’d like to define it as an entity that listens to its audience and creates great products again and again, time after time. If you can do that, I’d classify you as successful.
That’s all on success and sustaining greatness from me. See you all next post!
Signing off,
Chris
