Promotional Tools Used for Gaming Consoles
Marketing strategies for gaming consoles often fall into two broad camps: appealing directly to new customers with persuasive ad campaigns and targeting a core base of existing customers in the hope they will convince others to buy.
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Word of Mouth
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According to Seeking Alpha, a website offering stock market and financial advice, viral word of mouth is the best way to ensure sales growth. Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide a fast, effective way of spreading information about gaming consoles. However, how word-of-mouth dissemination of information is accomplished, it can involve one of two techniques: faddism or evangelism.
Faddism
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A faddist approach assumes that a company's customers buy its products because one or more of their influencers has something that is "cool," something unique and desirable. Customers buy the product for this reason alone and once the product is no longer cool, they move on to the next cool thing. While it can secure one-time sales, this approach is weak as it does not secure a loyal customer base. With respect to gaming consoles, being successful in this approach requires a constant stream of new, "cool" games, attachments and accessories, e.g. introducing a motion-sensitive controller or a gun prop for use in first person shooter games.
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Evangelism
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The ideal situation is to recruit customers who evangelize about the product and convince others it is worth their loyalty. This turns non-customers into new customers and new customers into future evangelizers. This is how viral word of mouth can secure a loyal customer base well into the future. With respect to gaming consoles, being successful here mostly relies on keeping users hooked on your original project to the point where they cannot help but tell others about how great it is. Sony's PS3 may be an excellent example of this strategy. It has positioned the console as the central entertainment unit in the homes of its users, demonstrated by its ongoing campaign (as of March 2011) with the tag line, "It only does everything."
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