Hannah:

Today’s topic is loyalty and evangelism. We all know some people who are always recommending certain brands, and we know that people pay attention to what those advocates have to say, but why? What makes some people want to promote things more than others, and how can you ensure that it’s you that they’re talking about?

As usual, we’ve got some psychology from Scott, back up with sciency bits from Chris, and statistics and factoids scattered around the blog by me.

Scott: How often have you seen people recommending a product or service on twitter or other social networks? How often have you clicked a link from a friend and even gone as far as buying a product based on a recommendation from a friend?

To give some understanding to why people recommend products, we can look at the core instincts of why people communicate. At a base level people talk to each other to survive, to connect and build relationships, to make sense of the world, to benefit economically and to relieve tension. Word of mouth has its foundations in connections, building relationships with others.

Recommendations are generally driven from a couple of motivating factors:

1. Do I like your offer, product, service or content?
2. Will telling my friends make me look good?

“Most people find Hollywood blockbusters more interesting than Cheerios and iPhones more interesting than dish soap. Consequently, this perspective suggests that movies and iPhones should be talked about more and that boring products such as Cheerios will have a hard time getting WOM.”

This suggests that consumers talk about things that provide social currency, when sharing consumers communicate not only information but also something about themselves. Most people want others to think highly of them, and talking about interesting things should facilitate this goal.

Here comes the science!

Ooh now this was a tricky one. Searching for why people want to liked initially took me down a path of self-help, which wasn’t what I particularly wanted.
After a while though I got somewhere (and received my dopamine kick as a response): a study of 15 to 24 year olds showed that being liked activated primary reward regions including the nucleus accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, opsterios cingulate cortex, amygdala and opercular cortex. Now there’s a fancy list if ever I saw one…
But it looks like the good old amygdala is heavily involved again “Participants showed greater activation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala in response to being liked by people that they regarded highly compared to those they regarded less so”.
It goes on from there, with the main takeaway showing that being liked activates the same areas of the brain as other reward mechanisms do, but also involves additional regions too. Put simply, I think that means that we place quite a bit of importance on being liked.

So how does this help an indie developer?

Well first things first do ensure that the opportunity for them to share is at least there. But then perhaps give a lot of thought to the messaging that you provide to the outside world: what opportunity does it give people to look good if they pass on this information to their friendsa and contacts? “I got this news first” is perhaps one option, but any way that allows the evangelist to share a bit of their own identity will help far more. Minecraft is of course a great example, when you look at how many videos there were from people who could show their personalities in their creations. Sure, your game might well not be as open-ended as Minecraft, but there may well be other ways to let people customise a part of the experience before sharing it with the digital world.

So, this is the end of our second Marketing Week! We hope you’ve found it useful, and we’d love to hear your feedback. But before we let you go, here are some of the primary conclusions we’ve drawn from the research we’ve done over the last 5 days:

• Don’t focus exclusively on gaining new customers. Nurturing your relationship with existing customers will help create “brand advocates” who will promote you.
• Keep up with current tech, as it makes older models obsolete.
• Neuroeconomics, the science of decision-making, is fascinating and complicated. Also sounds awesome. Kinda like a superhero. Neuroeconoman! No? Oh, ok.
• Seemingly unrelated factors can make a huge difference when it comes to inspiring sales, especially impulse ones.
• Try and make promotional materials evocative in some way in order to improve recall.
• Encourage people to buy now by using time-limited offers, appealing to their loss-averse tendencies.

Hannah:

Anyway, to help demystify neuroeconomics further, Scott’s here!

So, what is it?

Scott: Neuroeconomics is a research field that tries to explain the processes of why individuals make a particular choice when faced with a number of options. Behind the visible act of making a purchase lies a decision process that we all go through when we decide which product we buy:

1. Problem recognition, perceiving a need. This can be as simple as noticing that you’re out of milk or it can be triggered by marketing efforts.

2. Information search, seeking value. Generally falls into a two step process.

• Internal searching, using your memory to recall previous experiences with products or brands, this is often sufficient with frequently purchased products.
• External searching, if you don’t have any past experience or your knowledge of the product is insufficient then you’ll look to external sources as the risk of making a wrong purchase is much higher. Personal sources are generally the first port of call in this instance, do friends/family have recommendations/experience in this area? Public sources such as reviews online are usually second in line, followed by marketer-dominated sources like advertising, company websites and sales people.

3. Evaluation of alternatives, assessing value. The information search clarifies the problem for us by suggesting criteria to use for the purchase, yielding brand names that might meet the criteria and developing consumer value perception. Our criteria represent both the objective attributes of a brand (such as its features) and the subjective factors (the prestige of a brand).

4. Purchase decision, buying value. When it comes to purchasing decision, we tend to go down 1 of 3 routes

• Who to buy from, which can depend on past experience with a retailer, and the terms of sales (price, discounts, offers etc)
• When to buy, which is influenced by things like sales, time pressure and shopping experience
• Do not buy, this happens when our criteria haven’t been met for whatever reason.

5. Post-purchase behaviour, value in consumption or use. After buying a product, we compare it with our expectations and are either satisfied or not. Satisfaction levels will affect our value perceptions, recommendation of the product and repeat-purchase behaviour.

Ok, so we have 5 parts to the decision process from psychological perspective, let’s see how Chris has got on with the science!

But, why?

Chris: Well this revealed some interesting science! The first rather surprising fact to arise is that our decisions are all made at the subconscious level (in the frontal lobes again) and then sent to the conscious level. Here’s a video showing an experiment where the subconscious was making the decision 6 seconds before the brain did it!:

As the scientist in the video says though, just because decisions are made at the subconscious level it’s still in harmony with your conscious thoughts, so we have more science to discover first.

How we learn to make good decisions

Another interesting fact was how reinforcement learning plays into decision-making. Reinforcement learning is when you are not explicitly taught something, but learn by trial and error. Evidence is mounting that dopamine (our happy chemical) is heavily involved in this process. So when we make a purchase decision, of our brain decides it was an excellent purchase then in comes a dose of dopamine to reward us, and this in turn affects the synaptic connections between our neurons in a way that is consistent with the reinforcement.

So it seems that decisions are made initially at the subconscious level, and a reinforcement loop helps us to learn between good and bad decisions. But what happens at the actual moment of a decision?

Making a choice

In order to make a decision, we pull up a memory, a value system and an emotional response. That’s what the scientists are happy with so far, as it gets very complicated after that. For example it often isn’t just one memory that we pull up, but instead accumulate evidence for and against the available options. And the value system attempts to evaluate the potential outcomes from the decision choices.

Impulse buying

I found a great article listing all of the elements at play with an impulse purchase. Getting a bargain feels good and gives us an immediate dopamine reward so that helps. Even better: if you can people to a situation where there’s a bargain to be had, but stocks are running low (scarcity), and people you relate are happy getting their hands on the product (validation/social proof) then it’s pretty much a done deal. The poor consumer has no choice but to make a purchase or they’ll be missing out!

Priming the subconscious

Priming also comes into play with decision making. This is where our brain (normally subconciously) stores a stimulus for us, and brings it into play at a later date. So when we pull up that memory to make a decision, more info can actually be evaluated than we’re consciously aware of!

Conclusions

I think these brief findings do once again help to explain why you’re better off as an indie dev if you’ve been promoting your game for a good while in advance: if a gamer comes to look at your game for sale, and in flood memories of the hilarious youtube video that made them laugh or the cool screenshot that they saw, then that starts to sway the decision choice for them.

Without any prior knowledge that whole part of the process is missing, so the potential customer is left with the value-system looking at the potential outcomes and any immediate emotional tagging from the amygdala.

Also, don’t forget about the power of social proof: some of those memories may have been recommended by a friend or “expert” showing you the new trailer, so at that point it’s like a power up has been put on that memory to sway the customer even further.

Hannah: Wednesday already? This week is going quickly, but we’ve got three more awesome blog posts for you covering all sorts of exciting advertising things to help you make the most of your limited time! Well, potentially only two, if you want to discount this one.

Anyway, we’ve got some stats from me (still Hannah here!), some psychology from Scott, and some arcane science from Chris!

If you don’t have time to read everything, we’ve summarised some salient take-home points for you at the bottom of the post, but if you do have time it’s definitely worth a quick read.

Scott: Motivating factors in online community participation:

Anticipated reciprocity. The motivation to contribute based on the expectation that one will receive useful contributions in return.

Increased recognition. In general, individuals want recognition for their contributions. Profiles and reputation are evident in online community today with users keeping usernames consistent across numerous profiles and allowing a single login from Facebook on multiple websites tying your online presence to a single profile.

Ability to affect the community. Regular and high quality contributions can help individuals believe they’ve had an impact on the group and support their own self image as an efficacious person.

Sense of community. People are fairly social beings and it’s motivating to many to receive direct responses to their contribution.

The most relevant motivators for game communities, especially those around a game in development is likely to be the ability to affect the product with user feedback and suggestions and increased recognition for their contributions.

Chris: My investigations into this led me to The Advertised Mind, which describes what the brain does when exposed to advertising, and started by introducing me to the concept of the Supervisory Attentioning System.

Imagine you’re driving a car: I doubt that you’ll be continuously scanning the environment and dashboard looking for any indications of problems arising. However our brain is able to “alert us” when something warrants our attention in particular, such as a ball bouncing into the road out of the corner of our eye.

Or you could be sitting on the sofa using your laptop/phone while the TV is on in the background, and suddenly something is said in an advert that catches your attention, and you look up to learn more.

The Advertised Mind initially called this the Supervising Attentioning System: while your brain is generally consuming a whole slew of information (visual, aural etc.), it’s this system that cuts in and forces us to pay attention to something.

However they (and other people in labcoats) then took the research a whole lot further and discovered that the processing information by our brains actually occurs in two main stages: First off, the half-processed information goes through the amygdala, part of our limbic system (hey, look how knowledgeable I am all of a sudden!). This part of our brain emotionally “tags” the information. If it sees something it warrants worthy of interest then it sends a message  to pay more attention this information. The data is then fully interpreted in the frontal lobes of the brain along with the tag from the amygdala. Finally the frontal lobes send a message back to the amygdala to with say “never mind” or “you’re right – this is important!” and reinforce the interpretation for the next pass of information.

Phew! So what does this mean for people doing marketing? It means that amygdala activity correlates to the retention of information, and that this therefore depends on the relative “emotional-ness” of the information. So if your trailer/screenshot/press release causes emotion in the potential customer then it is more likely to be remembered by them. Or it could be the game assets on a page combined with the massive limited discount that makes the information being consumed exciting enough that it is retained.

Not only that, but I think this can also explain some of the importance of authority and trust, especially since we know that the brain never stops learning. Imagine you somehow get to go on the Internet for the first time and see some banner ads telling you you’ve won something. Your amygdala would trigger it as interesting, and then the frontal lobes would back that up and you’d click on it. But then you’d find out that you hadn’t won anything and would learn about spam. If you repeat this behaviour a few times you’d start to get wise to the fact: I can almost imagine the amygdala saying “Sod this, I’m fed up of being wrong calling out these stupid ads!”, and I think this is how we become “immune” to adverts.

However if someone we know and trust says something, we certainly don’t ignore them, and we’re fully engaged with whatever they’re saying. At this point the amygdala is basically flagging it all as “interesting”, “probably interesting”, “definitely interesting” etc.

So that’s why, in my obviously highly trained opinion, it’s so powerful if you get people who are trusted and have authority to help build awareness of your product, since there’s far less chance of the information being weeded out upon the brain’s evaluation.

Conclusions:

Community is important, especially for indie devs as you often cannot afford large marketing budgets so must rely on word of mouth. Having a strong community to spread the word about your game can make a massive difference when it comes to how well your game sells.

Awareness is also important, and is something that can be aided by having a supportive community, but try and aim any promotional material at eliciting an emotional response of some kind in prospective customers.

Be wary of using the same tactics you see over and over again in ads, as people become immune to overused advertising methods.

You may remember me from such things as IRC and sending out the monthly newsletter. And, if you don’t, then you should hang around IRC (#indiecity on Freenode for those of you already with an IRC client) and/or sign up for the newsletter!

Anyway, onto the topic at hand!

Firstly, I’m going to take you on a brief wander through the different advertising models and theory that have been proposed.

The obvious starting place is Wikipedia, which leads to a couple of traditional advertising theories:

Here we have the hierarchy of effects model, which lists 6 stages that a consumer goes through when making a purchase:

Click to enlarge.

• Awareness
• Knowledge
• Liking
• Preference
• Conviction
• Purchase

There is also the AIDA model which lists the stages as:

Click to enlarge.

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

However these are the old-skool “sales funnels”, and there are newer ones that have appeared as we’ve moved into a more social online world.

I particularly like this double-ended funnel:

Click to enlarge.

The advent of social media has meant that it is easier than ever to share recommendations and positive experiences with friends. This opens up another avenue of advertising for you, as you can encourage loyal customers to evangelise your product. However, you also need to take into account that it is just as easy to share negative experiences, so social media and sharing can be a double-edged sword.

This funnel looks like a decent guide to the stages of advertising, and so we’ll be looking more in-depth over the next few days at the topics covered by it.

Tomorrow we will start looking at community building and awareness, on Thursday we’ll check out neuroeconomics, and on Friday we’ll be finishing off with loyalty and evangelism.

Our team of intrepid explorers, making sense of the flood of information for you, is:

• Hannah (me!): I will be our fact and stat gatherer, using my uber-typing skills to navigate through the noise of the net to find the useful data
• Scott: Few people realise that this man is actually a budding psychologist. Some say he’s actually the next Derren Brown, although we couldn’t find anyone to substantiate that claim.
• Chris: He is going to try to resuscitate his previous fascination with the brain to find what it actually does when responding to marketing and adverts.

The team, hard at work!

We’ve previously given you some practical advice on how to manage your time, brand yourself or your studio, keep up with social media, make the most of events, and deal with press. But this has left us hungry to find out more: how does marketing work at a fundamental level, and what’s the science behind it? And of course: how can indie devs exploit this knowledge?!

So we’ve set ourselves a mission to find answers to these questions. Armed with nothing more than some books, the internet and lots of tea and diet coke we’re aiming to cover the following topics over the course of the week:

1. Advertising theory: What is currently known about how advertising works, and how do our brains respond?
2. Marketing and trust: what role does trust play in marketing and advertising? What is trust and how do you scientifically build it?
3. Neuroeconomics: See, we’ve learned a new word already! This seems to be the science behind decision making, and we’re going to try and find out more!
4. Social Proof: This psychological trait needs investigating, as it’s meant to be a very powerful effect.

So please joins us as we go all techie for a week and try to unravel…<drum roll> THE SCIENCE OF MARKETING!

For Science!

One thing we’ve come to realise over the course of building IndieCity is that it can be ridiculously difficult to actually finish a game, whether the problem is money, time, lack of playtesters, or anything else which gets in your way. This is one of the reasons we’ve recently launched the Indiecity Underground - a place for you to upload those not-quite-there-yet games – that can help you guide your game through to completion!

Based on your feedback we’ve also recently implemented the ability to upload games which use serial keys, and we are currently working on allowing gamers to pay via PayPal. Although we have plenty of ideas to put into action if you can think of something you really want from IndieCity, let us know. The voting board is open on the forum and we’d love to hear your input!

Apologies for the slightly delayed announcement of this, but I wanted to ensure Logbia was the first to know he’d won.

So now that the Underground is ready we thought we should give you all more details about it.

What is the Underground exactly?

The Underground is a fully integrated part of the site that is opted-in by gamer who want to get hold of games while they are in development. Underground games are then visually branded differently so that gamers can see at a glance whether a game should be considered finished or not.

As developers you can therefore upload test versions of their games, release them on the Underground and start building up an initial fan-base to create your initial groundswell and to get feedback on your games while there’s still time to make changes!

Selling games still in development is a relatively new business model and has seen huge success with titles such as Minecraft, as it allows you to start generating buzz early on and building up a community of hyper-engaged users.

For example, you could release a one-level test demo of your game for free and get some initial people trying it out, giving feedback via the forums that are automatically generated for you. You could then update the game to a more polished 3-level version and start charging a small amount of money to the next round of users willing to check it out. You can then keep building on this until you are ready to release the final game to the store, having already made some money during development, got a load of users on side and feedback to get the gameplay balanced before release!

Alternatively you might like to keep the Underground releases free all the way until launching on the store. Or charge from the very first version – it’s entirely up to you.

Haven’t I seen this on the site already?

The Underground has been available on IndieCity for quite a while now as a sort of test area for your game, but as of now games in the Underground will be public and available for purchase or download. To make up for the loss of this there’s now a Staging area, so when you first build your game you’ll still be able to check out the game page, give out license keys and download your game without it being public.

So how do I use it?

This means the upload process has changed slightly, so when you first build your game you will see the ‘Current Status’ which will show you where your game is currently. Initially this will show ‘Not Public’ which means your game is in the staging area, this will allow you to check out your game page, download your game and send out licenses of your game if you wish. You then have two choices:

Promote to Underground

This is for your alpha/beta titles, if you’re still actively working on large changes to the game and wouldn’t consider it v1.0 or mostly feature-complete then you’ll be looking at using the Underground for your game.

Submit to CAP

Submitting a game to the Community Approval Process will send your game out to our panel of testers who’ll check that your game page is correctly completed, it is rated correctly and that it runs OK. Once the game has passed through the CAP it will be available for purchase on the IndieCity Store.

With your game, depending on what state in development, you can jump straight to the CAP and Store or you can submit builds through the Underground until you’re happy and then submit to the CAP when you feel it’s complete.

PS. As we wanted to get this out to you before the 4-day weekend, we haven’t been able to do as much testing as we would have otherwise liked to do, so there might be a couple of little niggles here and there but we have tested uploading, CAP-ing, and browsing/downloading games with no problems, so if there are any issues they will hopefully be minor. If you do come across anything you think’s broken, please let us know and we’ll get on it as soon as we’re back in the office!

So, with that (and the fact we’ve not had a scheduled IRC chat for a little while) in mind, we’d like to invite you all to an IRC discussion tomorrow (3rd April) at 3pm BST (that’s GMT+1). If you can’t make it, we’ll also be looking for questions from Twitter, Facebook, and this blog, but we hope to see as many of you as possible there tomorrow! Our IRC channel is #IndieCity on irc.freenode.net or you can use the webchat client.

Last time (for the 100-game Challenge) we had a huge rush of games towards the end, and we expect to see another stampede to get games in during the final few days, but we (and our CAP testers, I’m sure!) would really like to see games come into CAP as soon as possible so any possible issues are ironed out prior to the April 13th deadline.

We’d really hate to see you miss out on getting an extra 10% revenue share because of something which could have been fixed if it had been submitted earlier!