The Quick Fix

The worst part of painting a house? Scraping and removing the imperfections prior to the first coat of primer. The process can be miserable, exhausting and end up making your house look worse then before. A new coat of paint would be far easier, cleaner and take less time. It would also make your house look immediately better.

That coat of paint will be gone in less then a year.

The house that was scraped? The lucky owner will be happy to know his/her house will not need another coat of paint for another 5-10 years.

The lesson: You can't just paint over your flaws without addressing the root of the problem first.

We live in a society of endless customization.You can get anything you want, anyway you need it. Then why isn't every product living up to expectations? How can products that are tailor fit to the consumer fail?

Customization isn't the issue. A commitment to additional features rather then the core product is.

The current model for fixing a sub-par product is adding new features, a brand new label and playing up the positives. Then we as marketers are forced to pitch these new features as "improvements". This short term approach will drive sales, traction and may even expand your customer base. You'll burn your core group of customers though. The key is being able to balance features with functionality. If your product does not function the way it should? Fix that first.

Focus on the needs of your customer and address what they perceive as your biggest weaknesses. Be honest and transparent about your decisions as well. Explain each and every change (and the reason behind them).

The biggest offender in this area? Operating systems and video games. Most of these products are released unfinished or in "beta". The companies then rely on their customers to find problems via crowdsourcing.

Companies and marketers do need to embrace crowdsourcing on a larger scale. However, they can't do it at the expense of a larger product issue. Crowdsourcing information and community feedback=awesome. Crowdsourcing product problems=dishonest and shady.

Fantastic marketing is only as strong as the product that it is supporting. Use crowdsourcing to fix your product prior to launch.

Until this problem has been fixed "But, wait, there's more!" should be removed from your vocabulary. Market your product's quality, not it's additional features.

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tagged as beta fixes, crowdsourcing solutions, marketing fail, marketing solutions, outsourcing problems, quick fix

Suzanne Vara

Absolutely Nicholas. Creating the following while in beta for the selected few allows them to be the chosen ones and they will be extremely loyal.

Great point!

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Nicolas Ward

Another value in beta, from the video game view again: getting into a closed beta program is a huge badge of pride for fans, and so you get your community pre-seeded with fervent supporters (assuming your beta is remotely playable, anyway).

Stuart

The pressure to perform is the driving force in putting out a product that still needs some patches. Consumers are waiting for the latest and greatest game or upgrade and are willing to accept in its infancy. We have become so accustomed to upgrades that the first version is a beta version that people test out.

I agree - do it right the first time and put out a good product that performs.

In the case of video games, in particular MMOs, I'm not sure it's really possible to get an accurate scalability test. You can estimate, throw a bunch of artificial network load at your servers, but you don't have a solid idea of how people will congregate and use your game world until you have real people playing en masse.

The other big factor is that many of these games have fairly complex "balanced" ecosystems/economies/combat systems. You can design a lot of this carefully, but at some point an intrepid player will find the "correct" strategy for a certain attack/area/mission, and if successful, it will come to dominate the player culture no matter what the designers intended. A great example of this is the Alterac Valley battlefield in World of Warcraft; as originally designed, it was meant to be multi-hour siege warfare; in its current incarnation, the "correct" strategy is to rush the enemy base, both sides tacitly agreeing to go all offense and race to see who gets through the automated defenses roughly unopposed first.

That said, there are definitely a number of things that could be done pre-launch. I think one of the biggest errors in video game marketing has to do with release dates (and the relevant promises)... a lot of times a publisher wants a particular game out by a particular date (so that their coffers can see the launch weekend influx of cash), even though the entire development team knows its not ready yet. This is pretty much what killed Age of Conan, despite a lot of positive buzz before it came out - the game basically didn't work.

The next biggest error, at least in the case of MMOs, is publishers encouraging their dev teams to create the next WoW. They see Blizzard's $1B/yr cash cow and want that. What they don't realize is that they can't possibly siphon off the entire diverse player base in one go (one of WoW's advantages is that its various subgames appeal to many many people, and its relative ease of entry). This leads to "kitchen sink" games that try to have everything WoW has, but also try to be different, resulting in a stinking morass of gameplay. I think the answer is to be nichey - go long tail, find one aspect of WoW that you can improve upon and focus your game on that; you'll probably pull away the subgroup of WoW players that want that.

(I should note that for most people, MMO play is zero-sum... the nature of the games means that the typical consumer only has freetime hours to play one, and maybe occasionally dabble in others.)

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