Almost every gamers know about this well-known company for their Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo series.

Actually, just to be frank, I really do admire this particular company for their innovation, and of course, love the storyline about each of the epic sagas so much.

And today what I actually want to talk about is about their preference of advertisement. From my personal opinion, I do think that they don't really spend much into advertisement as the majority of their earnings are all heavily invested into R & D (Research and Development) department to create their new products, so I think it's likely that they don't have much cashflow to spend on advertising their products.

Then, I think this is how they get their 'free financing' for their advertisement.

First of all, since Blizzard has build up pretty good reputation (brand name) over its year of operation, and since their products are all quality assure, this lead to them having high bargaining power over their customers.

Truthfully, this makes them have dominant over the market consumers. In my personal opinion, I think that's the reason why they announce their products so early to the public, gaining their attentions to their upcoming games by releasing all sorts of trailers, CG animated movies, or etc. This will create a"rabies" over the gamers community, and with majority of the players anticipating for the next series, they'll do the job of promoting their products. I once heard people dubbed the time lag from the announcement of the game until the actual release of the game the "milking" period. Which is pretty true from what I've seen.

Say, for instance Starcraft II have been announced for one year plus, and until now, it has certainly created a chaos among the gamers, with each of them anticipating when it'll be release. This will, incidentally, triggers a chain reaction where players begin to talk about how much they are looking forward for the game, how it's gonne be like, or perhaps even trying to recapture the feeling they gain from playing it's previous episode, Starcraft. Literally, it should give a slight rise to the sales of Starcraft series.

I believe in the "ten percent" theory, which is where a person trying to deliver a message to the community, all he needs is to hit the ten percent threshold limit, and thereafter, the amount of people in the community (10%) will be more than enough to spread the words around as fast as plague; it's the same concept as the chinese saying of, 一傳十，十傳百.

So, for conclusion, I personally think that the pre-announcement of their upcoming product (and also constant update of information with gameplay videos) is a good business strategy to attract customer's attention, and utilising them as a free source of finance to promote their products. A sharp and witty way, I'd say, and of course, nonetheless, I'm really impressed.

Good to go, Blizzard Entertainment.

Labels: Review, Thoughts