Behind the Scenes Look : The Making of Promotions

One of the great things about working in the marketing department for a gaming studio is coming up with new ways to promote really awesome items that our creative teams have brought to life! Not a lot of people can say that they brainstorm sales centered on panther mounts, piggles, and swashbuckling companions in Pirate crews. While one may think it is all fun and games around here, there is actually a lot of time and effort spent to come up with marketing promotions for our players.

We take a few things into consideration when creating promotions including player feedback, sales data, and past performance.

Player feedback is one of the most important things we take into account when coming up with promotional ideas and reviewing past promotions. We read up on our forums, fan sites, and other locations to get a sense of what our players want, like, and dislike in game. Once we collect that feedback we brainstorm what types of promotions our players would enjoy most. This goes hand in hand with reviewing past performance of a promotion like one of our Paloozas. We see what players liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, and what they wished would have happened.  We then take that feedback into account for future promotions.

Another important aspect that we consider is current sales for particular items.  For example with Pet-a-Palooza in Wizard101, we look at what pets are most popular and least popular in sales volume and try to figure out why. Is it the price? Is it the look of the pet or its pedigree? Does this pet have a spell card or not? From there we assign different discounts based on our analysis which hopefully will get our players excited and want to collect more pets. We also like to include other items that help out pets and not just pets themselves!

Once we have decided on the promotion and discounts, we need to come up with a promotion name. Naming promotions are fun and can be silly at times, but we definitely try to make sure they are not cheesy!   For example the Bag O’ Gold Sale in Pirate101 is a play on Pot O’ Gold during the St. Patrick’s holiday and is more fun than calling it a Gold Sale.

Along with a promotion name, we also need a page created to help promote the sale and give our players more information about what’s cool and new that is going on. We make sure that the screenshots or renders help support the sale and show off some of the great items that you can get. On the day of the sale, we make sure that the promotion is correct in the Crown Shop and everything is good to go!

After the promotion has ended, we look at player feedback to see what they liked, didn’t like, or if they were interested in it at all. Then we look at the sales performance to see if it’s worth running the promotion again or if we should come up with something new.

Hopefully this shed some light behind the scenes on how we come up with promotions here at KingsIsle! Keep posting and letting us know what you think of promotions we run and what else you would like to see going forward! We’ve always got our eye out looking for feedback.

Natalie Akilian
Associate Product Marketing Manager