*First and foremost, I want to apologize for the delay in my weekly blog. As an US Navy Active Reservist, I am assigned to participate in an Annual Training in Guam, where I am to assist in repair jobs on subs and also work on my Enlisted Ship Warfare Service (ESWS) pin. I couldn't find the time to do my weekly blog as I was already neck-deep in both military work and studying. For this weeks journal blog, I am combining both week's 4 and 5 reading material and discussion about the current production team's status. I wish to thank you all for your kind understanding.*
*Week 4-5 Reading: "Marketing Metrics" by Paul Ferris
-Chapter 1: Introductions
-Chapter 2: Share of Hearts, Minds, and Markets
-Chapter 3: Margins and Profits
-Chapter 4: Product and Portfolio Management
-Chapter 5: Customer Profitability
Out of the 2 weeks combined, I started reading chapters 1 through 5 from the "Marketing Metric: The manager’s Guide to Marketing Performance. I did try to watch the regular class lecture recordings, but I was dealing with horrible internet connections, so I went and did some of my own self-studying. I learned a lot of basic strategy to use for metrics in marketing and know some of the ways to
The first chapter is just a fellow introduction that goes through the topics of what Metrics are in marketing, why do we need the formulas to estimate the costs of a product, what kind of data do we need to provide in our metric reports, and everything else that includes additional information and reference materials based on successful marketing metrics. To simplify what Marketing Metrics are, it is a means to improve the business focus on what our resources are, identify the range of the product estimated values, and support those data with various strategies from the business side such as finances, organization, and greater profits. Basically, metrics help support organizations by providing them simple information such as the direction of our product, where is it heading, and what to do when we reach our targeting goals.
Next up, Chapter 2 covers what Market Share is and how it provides several examples and methods to the effectiveness in metrics or strategies of marketing. Most of the chapters topics addresses the concepts of marketing as well as where to concentrate the large marketing in smaller firms or how to use a BCG Matrix to identify both Relative Marketing Shares and Marketing Growth. There is a lot of strategies that covers the effectiveness of the metrics through it's constructions, data sources, and compilations used to determine market share of the product.
Chapter 3, “Profits and Margins,” goes into detail about how your product or brand is making money through the Marketing Margins given in the book. It goes through a lot of equations about the Unit Margin and several other distribution channels the material goes through to help determine both the cost and the margins that make up the selling price for the product.
Chapter 4, "Product and Portfolio Management", switches topics over to brand or product awareness and demonstrates how to create an effective marketing based on the consumer's knowledge of the product and how we can offer a better trade-off of information towards both the company and product being developed. It goes through first-time testing the marketing and volume projecting through customer surveys that come with some estimated sale projections as a multitude of possible results in evoking better variations of growth.
Finally, Chapter 5, "Customer Profitability", goes over more details from chapter 2 over customer profits as a metric itself. We want to understand how to monitor all the marketing spending from a customer's recent spending and retention rates as a whole. Given that we all have a good accurate data over the ratio of total potential customers over the known customers, we can find a better means of increasing our products income through the profits of both Lifetime Value and Customer Value.
All of these chapter that I've read so far provide chocks-worth of information that will benefit my research over a pre-alpha game being developed (assuming that I gather enough data to complete the profitable projection for the game's release). I want to provide as much information as I can, but the best that I can do is utilize some of the known strategies of consumer awareness (advertisements, known production's software budgets, etc.), compare the game to another similar product, and estimate the margin projection rates for the game while finding ways to increase the profitability of the productions standing.
Weekly Production Review
As I have mentioned before, I was busy with military work during these past 2 weeks. However, I did manage to complete my 4 C's Marketing report and turned it in to both the lead and the sponsors. In some contrast, there wasn't a lot of things to talk about regarding the productions contents, conduits, consumption, and convergence since the project is still in its pre-alpha stage. However, it did give me some good insights over the possibilities that we can use as soon as the game, "Grey Area" becomes playable. As far as I have seen in their production status, they are good with completing their overall scope rate of the project and will not afford to cut any corners in completing their tasks. As for the other reports, I plan on catching up now that I have returned back to the states and have already started on filling out both a Metrics and a Market Analysis Report for the team. Its a lot of work, but so far it seems like an easy process to get behind. I would need to cover the Marketing Metric's four different analysis; which includes the cost analysis to produce the game, the Margin analysis that gives me an estimated margin for the product, Break-Even analysis that will show the balance and return of how much the production will need to earn some return money, and finally the Target analysis that has an estimated range of the audience that will notice the game. The game is a stealth action game that excludes violence from their categories, so it is safe for audiences over the age of 13 to play this game when it gets released. Along with the competition, their stealth game would likely be up against the other stealth games like Metal Gear series or Dishonored, but they want to exclude the aggressive contents from their game.