IT ’ S REALLY HANDY IN TERMS

OF CHOOSING WHAT CHANNELS

WE USE TO

TARGET THAT CUSTOMER , INSTEAD OF BASING IT ON ASSUMPTIONS .

Becky McKinlay , Head of Marketing , Big Potato Games

These customer profiles will be used across the company to guide everything from new product development through to marketing , distribution and pricing .

“ We ’ ll now be able to say to our creative team , ‘ we want to make a game for this person ,’ and they ’ ll be able to see from the profile what type of game they enjoy . Or they might see that the environment is really important to this person or what kind of price they ’ d be willing to pay . For example , we discovered keen board gamers are happy to spend a lot more than the casual segments .”

While Big Potato Games is yet to complete its consumer profiling work , it has already started to put its learnings into practice . One interesting theme to emerge when it probed respondents about what would motivate them to purchase a board game in future was sustainability . The brand has already started developing plasticfree games , so this confirmed that it is heading in the right direction .

What ’ s more , when the company is ready to take these new games to market , McKinlay said it will know exactly where to advertise to reach target customers .

“ Now we can go to media planners and say , okay , so we have this customer and this is who we want to target this game at . What works for this demographic ? Is it TV ? Is it out of home or is it social media ? It ’ s really handy in terms of choosing what channels we use to target that customer , instead of basing it on assumptions .”

Converted to consumer research

Big Potato Games has discovered so many benefits through consumer profiling , McKinlay now wonders how the team got by without it . “ I ’ m a bit like , ‘ wow , I can ’ t believe we didn ’ t

have this before ,’” she said . “ But you do need some budget to put behind it , which small start-ups might not have . We started with just three people and we ’ ve grown slowly over the last seven years . There are now 40 of us . In a sense , it ’ s cool starting to work with consumer insights now because you can see the company is growing and maturing .”

McKinlay said the consumer profiling carried out with Attest was far from a oneoff exercise and that Big Potato Games will continue to try to understand more about its consumers .

“ With audience insights , I don ’ t think it ’ s something that you can just do once and be like , ‘ that ’ s it , we know who our audience is ,’ because things change , people change , trends change . We always need to be revisiting it .”

“ Even if you find the profiles don ’ t change too much , you might find that there could be opportunities elsewhere . For example , in June , off the back of COVID , we adapted some of our games so that you can play them over Zoom . It ’ s that type of thing ; always making sure that if there ’ s a certain space where games are growing , we understand how we can then cater to that .”

For companies that are on the precipice of investing in consumer research , McKinlay concluded that it ’ s well worth it : “ I think you ’ d be silly not to if you ’ ve got the resources . I do think a key part of a business is knowing your customer .” �

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