Is it Human Nature or are all marketers schooled at the same place?

[grynge]

A post on venturebeat the other day bout up a question to me about Game Promoters and marketing in general.

You will need to check the thread out to understand my question.

Are marketers relying on which one of the following to make the promotion material for sales

1. human nature (have they done studies that tell them which image works best?)
2. schooling (everyone knows e=mc2 so do they rely on rules they learnt at school)
3. or laziness (they just copy other well known and accepted advertising material)

I used to think it was the first option, they would do studies to see which image conjured the biggest feeling. After reading that article I am wondering if they just do number 3 or maybe it's just something they learnt?

NOTE: I am not sure of the correct terminology, if I am using promoters/marketing in the wrong way please forgive me I don't know what else to call it.

[Kay]

4. to save money

It's not only easier, it's also cheaper to slightly modify something older than to spend time and money on taking the risk of innovating something completely new.

In journalism there's the arse. As in, "Oi, you! Go and write an arse about [insert subject here]". I didn't know what was required of me at first and then discovered that they meant to write an ARS - an Annually Repeated Story. It's mostly just a spin on the same one they ran the previous year about Christmas cakes, weddings, dogs fouling the pavements, or whatever.

Dunno if that's a commonly used term or if it was just the place I worked in that spoke of it in that way.

They use very similar 'tactics' in the book publishing industry, where they ever so slightly modify the cover of an older successful book and use it as the cover for a new book. The British satirical magazine Private Eye has a section in it for look-alikes, ie people who look alike. They also have one called book-alikes - sometimes the similarities are quite, er, similar.

You probably find that in many industries. They find what works and stick to it.

[Dave McM]

Private Eye also has an occasional column dedicated specifically to the phenomenon of recurring themes in advertising - called "Ad Nauseam". It usually covers rehashes of ideas that have been used before, but also includes rip-offs of YouTube videos.

I'd guess that the best ones probably rely on 1 most heavily, possibly with a dash of 2. Anything relying heavily on 3 or 4 is likely to come across as somehow boring and predictable, without the viewer necessarily being able to put their finger on exactly why.

Where 4's involved, I don't expect for a minute that the money saved will be the client's.

[TheodoreK]

There is something else here too. I did a quick research here and more than half of all the box covers presented in the video game box art cliché article linked in the OP are designed by the same 4-5 marketing divisions of well-known video game publishing companies.

Namely those publishers are: Activision, 2K Games, Microsoft, Electronic Arts (EA games are the most common in the article by a very wide margin)

I don't think the article is very objective, it just counts hits and ignores misses as well as squeezing the facts to make a point.


Regardless, about the question posed in the OP; I think it is human nature to go with the flow and avoid reinventing the wheel. Most radical innovations are doomed to fail so marketers -as well as people in most other professions, opt for small, controlled steps in differentiating their work, rather than quantum leaps.

[cash ninja]

I think the most successful advertising campaigns have used extensive research and fine tuning to figure out what works - obviously that is a time consuming and expensive process, so not only are people going to want to 'recycle' that others are also going to want to rip it off and get a free ride off others' research.

I've just started reading a really interesting book called 'The Power of Habit' by Charles Dunhigg - I haven't got a long way into it yet but one of the things it has already mentioned is how marketers have used the human minds way of forming habits to successfully market products. Definitely an interesting read.

[JimWaller]

Personally, I'd say it is a combination of more than one if not all of the above reasons. In general, internet marketing or at least the MMO niche is very incestuous. Stories and marketing techniques/ designs get passed around.

There is a popular story that the graduating class of an ivy league school (it varies depending on who tells it) were asked if they had a plan for their future and a span of time later (usually 20 years) the most successful were those who had written down their goals. In truth, the study didn't happen, but the story has been told and retold so often it has become a sort of urban legend. It is an interesting story that makes a good argument for writing down your goals, but it is a falsehood nonetheless.

In the case of the OP, there may be another factor if as Theodorek says there are only 4-5 marketing divisions involved, a handful of people's personal taste may also come into play augmented by the need to be competitive.

It's funny so much complexity comes from something so simple.

Jim