This entry is kinda fun, kinda sad for me. I was supposed to go to the Nordic Game 2024 this week, but some things need to be taken care of here, so I stayed. Not all is for nought, though, as I had my speech pre-recorded and am about to share it in this entry. I’m still available on Meet To Match there, so if you’d like to have a chat, you can schedule one there. Or just reach out to me via jakub@heapsagency.com.
Anyway, the recorded speech is right below and the text version is below the recording.
This talk is about the Messy Middle strategy in regard to its possible applications in marketing in our industry. But, before we start talking about it, let’s make a brief detour and talk about an older model.
AIDA Model
AIDA is still the standard model used in marketing in general. It expects to make a sale after going through 4 steps:
Awareness – a prospect finds out about the product,
Interest – the prospect takes an interest in the product, learns about it,
Desire – the prospect recognizes the product as something valuable in some way and wants to acquire it,
Action – the prospect takes action in order to purchase the product.
The model’s pretty good and it’s been used with great success for designing marketing campaigns, both in the B2C and B2B fields. An example brand that does it is Nike, especially in regards to their performance footwear. They partner up with well-known or overachieving sportspeople to tap into their fanbases to create awareness within a potentially interested audience. They can create their signature shoes, like Air Jordans or Ronaldinho Tiempo. The athletes used these shoes which generated interest – “what shoes does Ronaldinho wear that allow him to do all the crazy stuff with the ball”? Desire is a bit more complicated – the shoes can look great and be perfect for daily use, or offer phenomenal possibilities on the pitch, like with Ronaldinho Tiempo. You wouldn’t want to wear them every day, as they have a highly textured sole which would make walking in them quite difficult. However, these shoes would theoretically allow you to do what he did. Which kid interested in football in 2004 wouldn’t want that? Then through various promotions and adverts the prospect, or their parents, will get the shoes. As you can see, it works and is proven. This model, however, has one glaring issue. It assumes that all of the steps need to be taken in the said order to achieve a sale. This often isn’t the case, especially in our industry. User Acquisition is a great example of that. You know, intermittent or social media ads that are meant to get people to download the advertised game. There are usually no outreach campaigns conducted separately to increase the awareness of their products. The rigidity of the AIDA model ignores real-life purchase behaviour.
Because of this, a couple of new marketing models have been developed, such as The Hankins Hexagon which is better than the AIDA model because its steps (passive exposure or assimilation, trigger, comparison, evaluation, purchase and post-purchase) can mostly be fulfilled in free order, but it still assumes that all of them will be completed. I disagree with that, as my experience has shown me this doesn’t have to be the case.
Messy Middle Model
Therefore, it’s time to talk about the messy middle concept. It states that a prospective client needs to be aware of the existence of the product. Then, there can be any communication issued, however, one of the things often done before trying to reach conversion is to create pieces of communication that will increase the perceived value of the product. Once enough value is built, plenty of small pieces of communication are created. They pertain to various emotions and desires a prospective client may have. These pieces can be called hooks or triggers. When the prospect is hooked, they explore and evaluate the information about the product. They can even experience it in a way. From the experience, comes a purchase.
Real-life case study
A friend of mine uses this model at his own agency. He deals with social media for different industries, including automotive, so let’s showcase an example of a messy middle campaign his company has conducted. Due to confidentiality, I’ll use fake brands:
- The client, a car manufacturer, was about to release a new car.
- The agency conducted a big paid social reach-out campaign that said “New Fervoros Eleganza coming in May” combined with a photo of the car. Such a simple piece of communication was exclusively to increase brand awareness – not to make people buy the car. The image also helped with showcasing what the car was.
- In the meanwhile, the car managed to score very well in crash tests, and have decent reviews in press, especially getting praise for strong engines, which translated to good acceleration, for comfortable suspension, and for unique looks. There were also things that the reviewers didn’t like, but let’s not talk about them.
- These good opinions and scores helped with making the car seem more valuable in the eyes of potential buyers; plenty of them got converted into press pieces, organic social media content, inbound stuff, PPC content and such – this worked as a means of increasing the perceived value and quality of the car.
- Then, my friend’s employees started creating plenty of triggers; they pertained to both the pros of the car and possible situations which could become “triggers” for the prospective buyers; some example triggers included simple slogans like “arrive anywhere in style”, “joy of speed for the whole family”, “ride in exceptional comfort”, “officially the safest new family car” and such and released loads of small PPC campaigns to “hook” their prospects to have them read more about the car and its features on a landing page. The link to it had UTM values for tracking.
- The landing page had a CTA that allowed scheduling test drives, which is the best way to experience a new car.
- Then, the rest depended on the car and salespeople at the dealerships, but it was a straight path to converting.
- The car sold quite well despite its relatively big price tag and the manufacturer recognised the importance of the social media campaign conducted by my friend’s agency.
The overview of the campaign
How is that different from any AIDA or Hexagon campaigns? The Messy Middle model recognises the fact that pretty much all of its elements, the big reach-out campaign, building value, evaluation and exploration, experience and purchase do not exist separately from each other. They all can be treated as part of building brand awareness, the potential customer can pop in at pretty much any point of conducting a campaign, aside from experiencing the product, they don’t have to partake in all of the steps They can repeat some, especially exploration and evaluation. This reflects a more chaotic tendency of human nature and may lead to conversion at any point in conducting your campaign.
I’m inclined to believe that plenty of activities we do as video game marketers already fall into this principle, whether we are aware of it or not. For example, all of the communications you conduct may be considered a part of the Messy Middle model. A press release about you making a game can be a part of your brand awareness efforts. Showing cool features on social media and having a sleek trailer would provide value that would be helpful for the potential player who’d consider getting your game. Having a demo to let them experience the game.
Example campaign for a video game
However, the purpose of this speech is not to find what already exists but to showcase an example campaign that adheres to the principles of the model as well as it gets. A typical campaign, by the way, I may be using this word loosely to refer to the entirety of activities or particular actions, so the exact meaning will depend on the context, I imagine, would be as follows:
A big brand awareness campaign – The game’s logo, a key art that conveys what to expect from the game or an announcement trailer and a simple slogan; in regard to the methods, I imagine that PR activities and a huge PPC campaign would suffice; this step also allows for steps rarely seen in our industry, like OOH campaigns with billboards, TV commercials; let’s say that we’re working on a racing game – entering a motorsport series with a team of your own or becoming a title sponsor of one would be on the cards.
Then, it would be the time to create value behind the brand; this is where you should publish plenty of good stuff about the game – impressive screenshots and clips, showing off the prowess of your star employees, making content around USPs and such; organic social media, maybe with a little bit of boost, devlogs, additional press and influencer coverage would be the go-tos.
After generating a substantial amount of the statements and content mentioned above, it would be time to start creating triggers. I imagine that in order to keep it relatively cost-effective, a couple of templates consisting of an image and copy would pertain to various motivations, videos would be nice, but probably more costly and labour-intensive to make. Let’s stick with the racing game idea. “Race against your friends”, “Be the drift master”, “Be the fastest”, “Pure joy of driving”. Each of them appeals to different feelings associated with driving sports cars and is directed to enthusiasts of different breeds. Having created them, we can conduct a big PPC, possibly paid social ads campaign.
Of course, running these trigger ads would need to be timed well and there should be a way for the prospective players to give the game a shot. The very least you should have a place to wishlist it, like the Steam page. It would be way better if you had open tests, a demo or a prologue. Of course, encourage people to wishlist the game, so they are ready to get it once it releases. And, naturally, make a good game.
The beauty of the model is that it reflects the fact that the potential customer doesn’t need to go through an entire sales funnel to make a purchase. A person may get recommended the demo on Steam and buy it, or enjoy it while watching their favourite streamer.
Pros and Cons
So, what are the pros of the Messy Middle model? The major ones are as follows:
- it offers a holistic approach to marketing,
- it doesn’t enforce rigid sales funnels to conduct your activities,
- as it’s been formed outside of our industry, it is full of activities that are not common in our industry, but work for others, so you may experiment more than you’re used to.
Some of the cons include:
- a big focus on PPC activities can be costly, especially for smaller studios,
- studios more focused on UA may not be interested in conducting campaigns focused exclusively on brand awareness,
- less standard activities such as OOH may need external expertise and may be hard to track, focus on strict geographical areas and won’t be as precise as most of the tools we use as a standard in the industry.
Still, I believe that the Messy Middle model may be an interesting prospect to use in your marketing. It could be used for enhancing your current communications, better understanding the customer journey and even creating your very own campaigns based on the model.
Hopefully, this talk will be of use to you. Cheers and thanks!
Heaps Agency 