Great Marketing!

I love an example of wonderful marketing.

What takes great marketing? Many things to be exact. You have to be just at the right moment, with the right product, in the right setting.

Now i'm a gamer and I follow games. So when I heard Modern Warfare 2 wasn't going have dedicated servers, I was upset.

A side story, a few years ago I bought Battlefield 2, played it got bored haven't bought an EA product since.

Back to present day, I was upset with no dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2 and therefore canceled my pre-order. Now I hadn't bought a EA product in quite some time, especially from DICE. However Dice came out and did an example of brilliant marketing.

I would like to define a few examples of solid marketing
1. It has to have a solid rate of return
2. It has to be at the right moment
3. It has to offer the right product or feature
4. It has to make as big of an impression as possible!

Now I don't think DICE decided to do this all because of what Modern Warfare 2 decided to do. I think DICE marketing people just say the outlash (as was expected) against IW and went "uh, we aren't doing that let's make sure everyone knows!"

Here's the press release:

http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/battlefield_bad_company/archive/2009/10/26/dedicated-to-our-pc-players.aspx##

What DICE has done is clearly said "Yes, everything will the same, no we aren't changing anything, and we are here to support you!"

What happened? It went Viral! Forum posts on IW own forum went "Cancel pre-order buy Bad Company 2" reviews all over the net focused on Bad Company 2! The entire community shifted focus from Modern Warfare 2 to Bad Company 2. I canceled my pre-order and pre-ordered Bad Company 2!

Before this I didn't even know Bad Company 2 was in development, I wasn't even interested in it. However DICE saw the chance and seized the moment. Showing you, how great marketing works.

So let's go back to what makes great marketing.

1. A Great ROI: I'm sure DICE didn't spend a whole lot of money posting this. I mean they wrote up a blog entry consisting of 536 words. How much did it cost them to get the person to write it, host it, everything? Maybecause of bandwidth $1,000? I mean i'm completely guessing here however Bad Company 2 sells for what $50? That's 20 copies they need to sell. I'm sure they sold several thousnad at least. Let's just assume as a direct result of that press release they sold an additional 10,000 copies at $50 each. Thats $500,000 or an ROI of 500:1
2. They did it at the right moment, right after IW came out and screwed us!
3. They offered the right product, dedicated servers
4. Make a big impression? Um, yea it did.

So great marketing on DICE part!