Brand Loyalty (was Re: [MUD-Dev] Requirements for MM (wasComplexities of MMOG Servers))

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Amanda Walker" <amanda at alfar.com>

> Where have you heard developers bemoaning the absence of brand
> loyalty?

I don't think anyone who isn't a marketer complains about brand
loyalty. On the other hand, I also don't think anyone who works in a
field as competitive as game development can afford NOT to be a
marketer to some extent.

To throw my two cents into this, brand loyalty to a game company is
predicated on the general idea that when a company makes a great
game, it will probably make more great games.

Unfortunately, this simply doesn't happen, except in some tiny
little instances that are already odd in many other ways (id
Software comes to mind). Companies like Activision and Electronic
Arts do produce great games, but they also produce an immense
quantity of crap. It's not like Bally-Midway in the seventies, when
you could reliably expect that the new game from company X would be
roughly as good and about as successful as the previous game from
company X.

Today, you can only judge a game on the game's own merits; a
development studio may build a great game today and a terrible one
tomorrow, and the same goes for the producer and the
publisher. While there are a couple id Softwares and Neversoft
Studios in the world, most companies are pretty hit-and-miss with
game releases. This is very much like the music industry; we refer
to the "Motown era", and Motown was just a record label. They were a
good record label, of course, and there were times when we could
rely on this label or that label to produce good products, but today
most record labels are producing so much product that there's no
overriding theme to it.  (Trent Reznor's "nothing" label is a
notable exception.)

It seems to me that almost every industry is facing what I call the
"Beatrice syndrome". This is a situation where companies want to
produce too much product under one banner without a distinct brand
identity. Beatrice did this in the late eighties with their "we're
Beatrice" ad campaign, and it creeped people out -- not because
Beatrice didn't have good products, but because the public suddenly
became aware that Beatrice made everything from dress shoes to baby
food. (Microsoft is facing a similar sort of situation, where they
are simply too damn big to put everything under one label without
scaring people.) Nobody knew what Beatrice was about.

A common solution to this problem is sub-branding, which is what
Activision is starting to try with the O2 line of sports
games. Another common solution is rebranding; Toyota does this with
Lexus, GM does it with Saturn. The primary difference between them
is that Activision's O2 inherits any opinion the viewer may have of
Activision, while Toyota and GM effectively divorce themselves from
their subsidiaries. Sub-branding is usually done when the public has
a good opinion of your company; rebranding is usually done when the
public has a bad opinion. Conflicting opinions are important, as
well; Toyota was seen as a small economy car manufacturer, so
manufacturing a luxury car to compete in the same market with
Cadillacs and Lincolns was next to impossible under the existing
brand. Creating the Lexus brand allowed them to set up an entire new
brand identity for the product.

Which leads to the obvious question: what should game companies do
to *create* brand loyalty? Clearly, brand loyalty was once very
important to the American people, and it seems to me that it would
be important again if it actually meant something. How could the
game industry add meaning to their brands most effectively?


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