Sell it now!

As was mentioned previously in my collegues’s blogs, the development of sustainable tourism at World Heritage properties would be reached by increasing awareness in order to protect the properties and their universal value. In accordance with the need of reaching a high level of understanding of the World Heritage issues, we are going to use the “Pigeon watch” game as “the warning message” for our target audience. By playing the game, young people from 16 to 25 would become committed to the principle of sustainable tourism and would learn how to save their local monuments and memorials in different countries. However, it is impossible to make “this message” heard by target audiences if the game is not user friendly and promotion and distribution processes are not carried out.  When the idea of the game was formed, our marketing team started to work on a digital marketing strategy. Our planning process follows the SOSTAC® model developed by PR Smith, Dave’s co-author on E-marketing Excellence.

We highlighted four key strategies for further actions.

REACH target audience. First of all, it is important to understand for whom we are going to create the game. Our target audience are young people from 16 to 25, who love fun, interaction, unconventional approaches and life news. Based on a study at the Jaume I University in Castellón three out of every four individuals within this age bracket use social networking sites more than the television to get up to date.

 Then, it was decided by all members of our team that the best platform for promotion of our game would be social media sites as the optimal place where young people spend most of their time. Considering the limited budget of the game project, the fact that the Internet is one of the cheapest media platforms, made it a more preferable promotion tool for us as well.

ACT achieve interaction. Based on game industry analysis, communities and social media provide significant springboards for interaction with our target audience. Many forms of interactions were produced:  sharing, reposts, retwits, reviews, mentions, blogshares. Additionally, we would always get feedback from our stakeholders which would be helpful for analysis and further game development. 

CONVERT to educate. Taking into account that most of the people play games just for fun, we have created a motion game where the gamer would have a short time in each level and would be indroduced to characters such as pigeons – protectors who are watching careless tourists and using their droppings as weapons against them. The chance “to poop” on  people’s heads makes the game entertaining and humorous for gamers. Meanwhile, by catching the gamers attention we will educate them and convert fun into knowledge. For example, when players would destroy tourist’s thoughts (key in the balloons), they would get an explanaton of why it is harmful to use cars and better to use public transport. The gamer would get information about the emssion situation in the Taj Mahal and would keep it in their mind.

ENGAGE through entertaiment. By reaching the maximum number of game players and enabling  them to become committed to the principle of sustainable tourism, we will create the base for World Heritage participatory culture. It is one of the most difficult and long-term strategies of our game-project. We hope that because of the game people would start to try to tackle the problems at the World Heritage and share with each other the same universal values.

After defining key strategies of the game-project we worked on marketplace analysis. The detailed target audience analysis was presented in Sukirti blogs and was mentioned in my previous blog as well. The competitors and partners scrutinized are based on the “Pigeon watch” game SWOT analysis.

The competitors analysis helps to identify  the uniqueness of the concept of “Pigeon watch” game.  Take for eхample, the very popular game “Angry birds” where the birds are also main characters and this game is defined as enjoyable by players. However, we can notice that in the “Pigeon watch” game the pigeons have the special heroic characteristics and carry out specific mission – to save world’s monuments. It means that in our game for the gamers it is easier to understand why they are playing this game and who are friends and who are enemies. Also, the most important features is the educational idea behined the story of pigeons fights against the careless tourists.

The partners analysis is nessessary tool for understanding who share the same universal values on the market. In next my blog I would present the first list of organisations which are presenting themselves as World Heritage careful.

All these analysises are helpful to achieve all the main goals of our project: increasing awareness World Heritage preservation program, reaching maximum number of the “Pigeon watch” game’s gamers and developing participatory culture among all stakeholders of World Heritage. These goals also would be reached by PR strategy which Sukirti and Ruta presented in their blogs.