Growing Marketing Strategy Development: Case Study Of Halfbrick Studios

Description of the Video Gaming Industry

Discuss about the Growing Marketing Strategy Development.

The expeditious growth of gaming industry is an evident outcome of the implementation of well-devised and elaborate market plans. In this digital age a product’s success relies on a well thought marketing strategy to ensure that the right information is catered to the right people. The marketing strategy development hinges upon how stringently the chief principles of planning strategy are being followed. Strategizing sales process, pricing of the product, distribution of channels, campaign planning and marketing plan are the steps to make the product a sure success (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith and Tosca 2016). . Among numerous video gaming manufacturers, Halfbrick Studios is the leading video game manufacturing unit in Australia that in recent times has produced the popular game series like Jetpack Joyride and obviously the root of their fame Fruit Ninja. Beginning from a small unit in Brisbane, they have expanded themselves worldwide with the success of Fruit Ninja and its precise target marketing (Studios 2017).

This report indulges in a brief description of the above mentioned flagship video gaming manufacturer, its orientation towards marketing process as well as discusses what significant role its one of the most popular and favored gaming series Fruit Ninja plays in the marketing of Halfbrick. Thereafter, it attempts to analyze the 5C’s of market in the context of Fruit Ninja and its patron enterprise. Along with this, it is worth to take a look at the company’s market survey on the mobile gaming space and how they have devised an appropriate market segmentation to execute all the promotional strategies. Lastly, recommendations and detailed justifications have been provided for the chosen market segmentations keeping up with the view of marketing mix.

This particular industry has seen a steep rise in growth since last decade because of its interactive entertainment provisions. Introduced back in the 1970s within focused markets it has grown as a mainstream industry with the advancement of the personal computer and gaming technologies. However, the profit margin in this industry is linked with the drive of technological progress and innovations, such as high definition graphics or advanced gaming consoles.  

Halfbrick Solutions Pvt. Limited originated in Brisbane, Australia initially worked on the licensed games. Founded back in the year 2001, this Australian game developing enterprise has produced the extremely popular game Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride (Thinkgaming.com 2017). Spread across six different locations in three different continents Halfbrick now has a market worldwide to operate on, thanks to the exceptional success of their Fruit Ninja production.

History of Halfbrick

Market Orientation involves meeting the requirements and desires of the consumers through the product mix. In earlier times, the aim of market orientation was to establish selling points to the customers for their existing products whereas according to the new theories the demands and preferences of the customers have become the pivotal point of concentration (Baker  2014). Talking about Halfbrick, it focuses to plan its marketing campaign precisely for its target consumers and promotes their games on the appropriate platform that has the most access to its selective consumers. They have begun offering FastStart managed amenities that facilitates the users to build up one-to-one communication and strengthens relationship among the existing players. They have identified the need of setting a live interaction medium among the competitors that will eventually increase the interest level of the players. Alongside this, the platform they choose to promote their new ventures is fairly targeted. As an example to this, we can cite the marketing strategy of Fruit Ninja on Instagram, chosen for its visual storytelling power. Taking advantage of this Halfbrick did not have to put any extra effort for promoting the stuffs from the game but to put them straight out of Fruit Ninja, as it had been (the Guardian 2017). With the tagline, “Ninjas Hate Fruit” Halfbrick was quick to grab the attention of millions of you tube viewers adding more publicity to this.

Behind the decision of marketing strategies, there lay five key factors concentrating on which a company proceeds accordingly. This report analyzes each of them in the context of the leading video game developing company, Halfbrick:

• Company: The strength of Halfbrick certainly rests upon its two successful mobile gaming apps, Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride as these have been the consistent highest revenue grosser for the game publisher company. Only Fruit Ninja has accumulated downloads of 300 million after being released in April 2010. However, if we want to figure out some weaknesses of the enterprise we must critically analyze its excessive reliance on social media reviews and feedback. One of the major reasons behind Halfbrick’s success was the high ratings of Fruit Ninja in use-ratings and iTunes (Blakeman 2014). The higher ratings of a game promises more exposure for it and increasing number of downloads.
• Customers: It is important to validate the assumed target consumers of any product before commencing the money marketing. With the help of demographic data, Halfbrick has targeted the youth and the platforms like Instagram and other social media where the youth have the most access (B&T 2017).
• Collaborators: To expand and attain a global space companies occasionally collaborate with one another. In 2011, Halfbrick had announced collaboration with the Chinese publisher iDreamsky in order to distribute and top the market in greater China. However, they have terminated their exclusive contract with iDreamsky since December 2016 and currently seeking a new collaborator offering greater transparency. Some other business partners of Halfbrick are: AppLovin., Chartboost, MoPub (USA), Campaign Monitor ( based in Australia but servers in USA), Citrus Joy (China), MediaBrix (USA and UK), Other Levels (USA and Australia), UnityAds ( throughout Americas, Europe and Asia), Upsight (USA, UK and Canada), Vungle ( USA, UK, Germany and China).
• Competitors: Halfbrick’s smash hit series like Dan the Man, Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja are hard to beat in any competition. However, in the global context it has been facing huge competition from several other popular game series like the recently released Pokémon Go, games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Temple Run series and many more. Kings is one of its chief competitors in the market with its hugely popular Candy Crush giving a tough competition to Halfbrick manufactures.
• Context: Halfbrick apparently does not face any political or legal hindrance and its usage of latest technology has provided it with a worldwide acclaim.

Usually video games tend to be addictive due to some certain features incorporated them. The market survey of consumer needs and desires reveals that high score, role play, chances of exploration in new areas embarking adventure and opportunity to build relationships with existing competitors are the keys to make a game super success (Shih, Chen and Chen 2013). Keeping this view in mind Halfbrick Studios has successfully integrated these features in their successful game series Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. In fact, Fruit Ninja was a game that enabled people of any age to enjoy the game and paly hassle-free. The key of Fruit Ninja’s success relied on its slicey mechanics and unpredictable timing (Solomon 2014).

Regardless of the tremendous success of game series published under Halfbrick Solutions games like Subway Surf, Temple Run and Candy Crush constantly pose threat to the organization.

Marketing Orientation of Halfbrick

Video gaming industry has always been depended on technological innovation and a world of virtual reality. However, creation of video game has become increasingly expensive and complex. This is why the game publishing companies have opted for mergers and acquisitions. Especially enterprises like Facebook, Microsoft and Softbank are showing their interests in purchasing games (Biggemann et al. 2013). A subsidiary of Facebook, Oculus VR has been working hard to for more technological innovations. Apart from this, mobile gaming is growing strong and game publishing companies are now focusing on introducing their games on the limited platform of mobile gaming (Grubb 2017). Besides, market demographics are continuously expanding with gender mix and people of all ages.

Collaborators or alliances are not actually the part of a company but help them run the business by providing them whatever materials the company might need. Halfbrick too has made several collaborations only to expand its games on multiple levels and making them available in regional languages too.

The SWOT analysis of the extremely successful game will help to get a clearer picture of the organization’s present situation:

Strengths	·         A much popular game with downloads more than 300 million ·         It is available on multiple devices and compatible with all ·         The branding strategy of the game has been excellent ·         User ratings have been consistently high ·         Addictive and a wide range of people can enjoy it ·         Social media has been used as a potential marketing medium
Weaknesses	·         It is difficult to hold the gamers’ interest with maintaining it consistently fresh and new. ·         Gamers become attracted to the new substitutes available in the market.
Opportunities	·         Introducing new games and upgrading the existing style ·         Expanding service ·         Smartphone users are rapidly increasing who can be newly involved ·         Technology too has been developing
Threats	·         Similar games are coming up intensifying the competition more than ever. ·         It is very easy to copy the app ·         Competitors can access the launch dates of the product and thereby can release a similar new gaming app ·         Consumer taste are changing
Competitors	·         Temple Run ·         Subway Surf ·         Candy Crush

Since not all individual consumers have, the same choice and preferences marketers divide their consumers into small segments based on several yardsticks. Discussing about market segmentation for video games it has been found that there are principally three types of consumers: Core gamers, Broad Market Players and some being Players and not Payers.

Concentrating on the market segmentation done, Halfbrick Studios must concentrate on the Top Tier, i.e. the Core Gamers between the ages of 15 to 40 (Vogel 2014). Market survey affirms that a Core Gamer usually spends 20 hours a week in playing games to which they are addicted and purchases at least four games in six months. Demographics also clearly indicate that the gaming consumer market is predominantly male who are ready to disburse a good amount in pursuit of the hobby.

However, the Core Gamers form only 25.6 percent of the gamers on which a widespread organization like Halfbrick should not rely entirely. They must also target the Broad Market Players or Middle Tier ones who build a far larger consumer-base for Halfbrick.

The value proposition, in business method ontology is the first of the nine blocks. It can be defined as the overview of the product and that why the consumers should buy and use that repetitively rather than opting for similar available products. The value proposition for the games published under Halfbrick studios are as follows:

• The games are a constant new source of exploration and hence chances of getting bored are less.
• Pricing of these games is flexible.
• Diversity in options is available where audience can choose from a long series successful games.
• Halfbrick has also entered the realm of mobile gaming

5Cs for Halfbrick

There is almost no doubt that games like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, Fish out of Water add a good amount of entertainment value for the Core Gamers. Though the latest games of Halfbrick, Top Farm1 and Yes Chef are not successful at all, Halfbrick is still Australia’s most successful game publishing studio and doing great with its existing popular games (Grandadam, Cohendet and Simon 2013). They must incorporate more innovations in the properties of their existing games and their focus should be on future.

Marketing mix is the foundation concept in the field of marketing. It can be defined as the combination of all the marketing tools adopted by an enterprise to pursue the aims in the target market scenario (Luxton, Reid and Mavondo  2015). However, the marketing mix in general categorizes 4 Ps of marketing decisions but an extensive version of 7 Ps is better to be discussed which are as follows:

• Product: This part deals with the games that the house is willing to offer in competition with the substitute products available in the market. Fruit Ninja, in this context was genuinely innovative at that point of time exploiting the touch screen feature of the mobile handsets, which made it hugely popular. Jetpack Joyride is based on exploration and adventure, which was very much favored by the teenagers, the Core Gamers (Studios 2017).
• Price: Appropriate pricing of a product is not only responsible to increase profit margin but it influences the marketing decisions and consumer acceptance of the same (Marchand and Hennig-Thurau 2013). While Fruit Ninja is available only for $1.99, Halfbrick has made downloading some of the games free keeping the mobile gamers in mind.
• Place: Talking about the place mix Halfbrick relies on social media greatly so that its marketing does not become limited (Norman and Verganti 2014). Thus, the appeal of the games published under this studio remains the same globally and the fan-base is spread far and wide.
• Promotion: Identifying the youth and teenagers as the target consumers Halfbrick accurately opted for the promotion of its games in social media sectors. They have chosen Instagram above the others because of its visual appeal where they can display the stuffs of their games without putting any extra effort (Lv et al. 2013).
• People: Talking about the people mix or the collaborators Halfbrick has several tie ups worldwide who fulfill the varied requirements of the organization assisting it to successfully expand its business worldwide. The collaborators and their functional areas have been stated above in this report.
• Process: Proper Processing of the marketing strategies results in a financially profiting outcome. The challenge that Halfbrick faces in this uncertain gaming industry is to consistently upgrade and reinvent itself to retain the gamers’ interests (Hawisher and Selfe 2016). However, Halfbrick’s games are very much popular on iTunes and Apple and they are pushing their boundaries continuously to meet the expectations of the target consumers (Christensen, Raynor and McDonald 2015).
• Physical Evidence: The physical evidence mix in video gaming industry greatly relies on the consumer reviews and ratings. However, Halfbrick’s recently published games have not earned that much ratings and good reviews except for Dan the Man, which has a whooping installation of over 7.5 million and an excellent average rating of 4.8.

Therefore, this report clearly shows the struggle of Halfbrick with new emerging marketing realities and growing competition. Halfbrick definitely has its strength in its already popular existing games but instead of dwelling in the past, they must look forward to the future. They must increase the quotient of the value proposition of the games in order to present it in a more lucrative way. Also the similar and substitute products are posing a great threat to this game publisher and to avoid that they have to be more innovative in game technology and should concentrate in earning a global reputation like those of Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft. Hence, the enterprise must address every issue with an appropriate solution otherwise locking into any particular one will not help them to develop a fitting marketing strategy to survive the rapidly growing competition.

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