At least three (3) things you felt were done well.
I realize the difficulty of this marketing course and understood well what was expected from myself to understand the material. I believe the few things that I thought went well was how I was flexible with tuning in what my production team was up to and try meeting their expectations as a first-timer in marketing business. I’ve also had to meet with a few deadlines with some of the marketing reports coming in late, but thankfully my instructor gave me some leeway in giving me more time to completing all my late assignments due to conflicting schedules. Last, I felt that even if I misunderstood or didn’t understand the marketing lessons at all, I wanted to believe I had the confidence to organize and properly setup a rough financial plan before a startup business takes hold. At least this way, it gives me some insight as to what I need to expect in real game marketing business.
Include why you think they were important.
I needed more time and help with the lessons on marketing as I was away for 2 weeks of military training. I was grateful that my instructor understood my worries and had assisted me with the best of his knowledge for what I needed the most in this semester. I prefer a simplified guide for financial planning since most of what was taught, certainly felt like it was at that graduates’ level of difficulty. While I am still going through the learning process of marketing and financial planning, I realize these are not acceptable excuses when it comes to the real job as most of the game company’s budget planning rests in our care.
What did you learn?
It is far too easy to make assumptions about consumer’s wants and needs, but in my experience that was my own mistake in poor judgement. Researching both the product’s quality and quantity was a big assessment that I needed to improve on. Fortunately, there were a few free sources such as SurveyMonkey and Margin Calculator that had helped me out a few times with budget planning. I was also aware that this course would go over some of the previous lessons on marketing analysis regarding brand awareness and what we need to focus on to remain in the business industry’s radar for a while.
How will you use that knowledge?
As I figured, marketing is a big Achilles heel of mine since I’m not well versed in the current market trend. I want to improve and cultivate these lessons where I can feel more confident with my estimate profiteering. I know well enough that it takes time to improve these skills since the market continues to grow at its own pace, but its better knowing the material first-hand rather than being thrusted into an actual marketing business.
At least three (3) things you felt could have been done better.
Basic team communication, prior knowledge on current global game market, and a justifiable marketing guide would have helped me do things better in this course. I need to face a few facts here; marketing is not something to laugh about, nor is it anything lofty. I needed to have a clear grasp of how valuable videogames are in the tech market and I wish there was a way to exemplify those startup examples through a better startup process since I was running around trying to pull together all the information that I learned from my course and was expected to show off my work to actual sponsors. I’ve also felt that I didn’t improve my previous lessons in time management as I was faced with multiple schedules colliding with one another and I didn’t prioritize well with my assignments. Finally, I didn’t have any general knowledge for where I would find marketing resources as most of the important data was hiding behind these pay-walls on websites. There is so much that I can do as someone who wants to spend cheaply or nothing at all on marketing analysis.
How could they be improved?
I suggest having some marketing websites or preferable sources to look at for better marketing management. I would also suggest that we simplify marketing planning instead of creating a lengthy documentation regarding all the information. While documentation is important, we need to develop a well-structured plan that anyone can implement in a business plan. Marketing plans are something we would chart out and predict the sales numbers over one fiscal year, then updated annually that will reflect the progress of the finance plans before achieving our goals.
Exactly what elements were difficult to understand?
The marketing equations were a tad difficult to understand, especially the Dorfman-Steiner Theorem since I had no marketing knowledge of what our game’s fixed costs are or what our current AED is now in the global game marketing. I felt that it wasn’t needed as much to evaluate advertising budget, but this math was too complicated towards testing our estimated costs, then restarting the process again with newly refined figures towards our spending budget.
What did you do to overcome these difficulties?
Honestly, this was one of the most difficult courses that I’ve taken that revolves gathering real marketing data within 7 weeks (5 weeks for me since I was occupied). I just had to be confident with what I estimated and tried my best to organize all my analysis the best of my knowledge, even if it’s not as accurate as I pray it would be.
What did you learn that was missing?
I made a few mistakes along the way with budgeting costs and target volume. That said, I needed to find some additional information online towards a better budget planning than what I was taught in class. Sadly, I was going in loops with all these suggestive budget formulas. The best thing to learn isn’t just from textbooks, but developing the experience with our own ideas of marketing planning.
What was the "most important element" of the class for you?
I suppose working with the team as a group, but I like to consider the most important element that I want to takeaway is how to properly organize the marketing data. It’s difficult to have good judgement over the value of the product and trying to differentiate the costs and estimates over both the product and advertisement sales.
Which part of this course was considered innovative for yourself?
I think the consistency and repetition within market identities was what made me realize there is more to it than just delivering a simple brand message to your target audience. I did learn about laying down business foundations from a few lessons ago, but it’s never enough to know how well a company does within the marketing’s growth. Needless to say, you need to aggressively move towards gathering customer’s likes and dislikes and never be afraid of being repetitive in target marketing and brand messaging. You just want to add in some creative ideas for the company’s image.
What changed the way you write you will approach game development?
Not that I feel like it made much of a difference with the way I thought about marketing, but I was struggling to find the right information to introduce the game product when it’s still around the pre-alpha staging. I did have a bit of fun when it came to discovering different advertisement plans, but it is only effective when we learn more about the content of the game. I suppose communications had a big part to play in this, but that was solely my fault since I was out of contact for so long due to training. When it comes to the actual business financial planning, I’m positive that I will be well informed about our product’s content before going into business analysis.