Marketing -> Can you start too early?
Sebastian K. Hickey:
Can you start to market your product too early?
That's the question.
If so, what are the consequences and how can you make sure you get the timing right? What are your experiences? Have you ever wished you'd done your marketing differently? What sort of pitfalls are there and how would you advise a newbie?
I am eager for your delicious wisdom.
P.S. Thanks to Nathan for advising me to start this thread.
Dan Maruschak:
It depends what you mean by "marketing". If you mean advertising and promotion, then yes it is definitely possible to do marketing too early. You don't want to build expectations that you can't meet. I'm sure you can figure out your own examples of products that haven't lived up to the hype, or were delayed long past when customers expected them to be available.
If you take a more modern definition of marketing, then marketing is part of product design. Word-of-mouth marketability needs to be designed into products. You want to design something that people will want to talk about (e.g. if your product produces an experience that is unlike any competitor in an excitement-inducing way) and that people will find it easy to talk about (e.g. produces an experience that people can tell engaging stories about).
Seth M. Drebitko:
Yes all the way around. You're more than able to market yourself before your product simply engage with the community. However if you're not well versed in the social contract of the community you could end up making an ass of yourself, which is not good PR. When it comes to product if your not at least quarter of the way done with a project you risk not actually publishing it, and in the industry we call this vaporware.
Nathan P.:
Dan hits the first pitfall pretty right on. Not to call anyone out, but here's the example that comes to mind: every Gen Con, I see someone pick up one of the Dresden Files RPG promo cards that says "Coming Soon!" and go "wait, this isn't out yet? still?" I think Evil Hat printed those up 3 years ago? Maybe 2. And I don't think it's going to hurt Dresden Files per se, but in general you don't want to link your product with the idea of "...still? Not here yet?". Vaporware is a danger.
The really problematic version of this is when you run a preorder for your product, take people's money, and then aren't able to deliver the product as promised. This has happened a number of times at all different levels of the publishing hobby/industry, and it's always really bad! I would counsel you not to run a preorder until you are absolutely certain the game will actually be printed. Like, files ready to go to the printer, if you need the preorder capital to do the actual run.
Dan and Seth are also both pointing at a big issue: there's a difference between marketing an individual product and marketing your brand. Again with an example: Dresden Files may suffer a bit from premature marketing, but Evil Hat has a strong enough brand that people tend to trust that it will, in fact, happen eventually. Someone else without an established track record, strong sales and loyal fan base who had been talking about their major licensed game for years and years - well, people would stop looking for it.
All the stuff about being a good community member, having a consistent presence and building a destination for people to visit - that's all brand management. A strong brand will retain people's attention in-between product releases, and you can tailor the marketing for each release to maximize it's impact on a target audience. But, especially when starting out, you tend to have to build a brand hand-in-hand with a product. It's hard to establish yourself without something to point at as an example of your work.
Does that all make sense?
Dan Maruschak:
On the topic of Evil Hat, Fred Hicks and Chris Hanrahan have talked about some marketing stuff, specifically the "announcing Dresden Files too early" issue, on some recent episodes of the That's How We Roll podcast.
There's also a recent thread on Story Games that talks about sales figures for independent games and what kind of marketing was done to get them.
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