I shall use the following points as guidelines to produce a strategy:

·        The product must have highly sought after benefits and enough potential customers to make the offering economically viable

·        A substantial number of perspective customers must be ready and able to purchase and use the product to justify market launch

·        The new product must offer the customer greater value than alternative offerings

·        The most important differentiator of new product launch is the strength of the new product launch strategy - even more important than the actual product attributes. [Source]

I intend to use facebooks social aspect to spread my game across facebook, firstly I will need a page holding information and pictures which will be simple enough to create. Whilst I do have a target audience I don’t want to limit my reach to only them, but have it spread quickly reaching as many profiles on facebook as possible using facebooks social mechanisms to do so.

Facebook’s Social Mechanisms

Facebook use’s certain mechanisms to try and group people with similar likes, friends and apps I intend to make full use of this feature to saturate facebook with pages related to my game offering large amounts of in-game currency for people who “like” the page (with a normal facebook account you would be referred to games, apps and pages that any and all of your “friends” have liked) or refer their friends but I want to take this strategy further and appeal to peoples competitive nature by creating a worldwide facebook “Event”. At this point we will have the launch page for the pre-launch event up and running, the next part of the strategy is how to get this event advertised and joined by the target audience allowing it to spread further to anyone who is a friend of the target audience increasing the possibility that the non-target audience will join the event.

(The event should be advertised for two months by the Zynga top 5 games before it begins to gather enough interest and run for two weeks to allow the users to spread the event through the “six degrees of separation” with the game launching a week into the event)

Advertising & Audience Awareness

Game	Monthly Active Users (Oct 2012)
Chefville	22,300,000
Bubble Safari	20,700.000
Farmville	12,800,000
Farmville 2	43,500,000
Castleville	11,300,000

ChefVille, Bubble Safari, FarmVille, FarmVille 2 and CastleVille are the top 5 games that meet the same criteria as our game, all with the same target audience and luckily for us owned by Zynga. This means that the games with the most use have been added to these users’ accounts allowing for them to promote and advertise directly to the user’s pages. With these 5 Zynga owned games we can easily promote the pre-launch event amongst the target audience quickly reaching millions of active users.

The following are typical of the answers given in our qualitative survey:

This is the information is the bases of the pre-launch competition, referral bonus and liking bonus with 82% of the users wanting free in-game currency

[1]How would you improve this game?

 “Free in-game currency”

With the information gained from these two question we discovered the social aspect plays a large part in 78% (74% of [2] 80% of [3]) of users enjoyment and discovery of the games, with this we formulated the strategy to spread the promotional event through this social link.

[2]How often do you play these games with friends?

 “Every time I play, there is always at least one of my friends on”

[3]How did you learn about these games?

 “Facebook spam from my friends and family”

These findings supports the secondary research we gathered on research strategy, we have used this information in offering a year’s free in-game currency (500 coin per week)  to make the customers feel that there is the possibility of “greater value than alternative offerings”

[4]When would you buy premium content?

 “When it’s at a reduced price or not at all”

[5]How much would you spend on premium content in a year?

“Form nothing to about £10”

Six Degrees of Separation

Six degrees of separation is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. [Source]

(Illustration of the six degrees of separation)à

This rule applies even more so to Facebook with people at the other side of the world being just a friend request away and even if you could not become “friends” with people you don’t know, the strategy would allow for the event to spread at 5x the rate of the normal rule by starting from 5 sources (the top 5 Zynga games). Not only do the Zynga games increase the rate at which the event spreads through Facebook but the event itself is designed to increase this rate with the users competing to refer as many friends as possible to win the year’s free in-game currency (500 coin per week).  

Summary

In summation the strategy will:

·        Have highly sought after benefits and generate enough potential customers to make the offering economically viable, through a well-advertised competition offering a year’s free in-game currency at no large cost.

·        Gather a substantial number of perspective customers that are ready and able to purchase and use the product to justify market launch by using the social mechanisms to spread the event using six degrees of separation. 

·        Make the new product seem to offer the customer greater value than alternative offerings with the chance of a year’s worth of free in-game currency (500 coin per week)

·        Increase the momentum of gathering user interest offering bonuses for game referral, liking of the game and joining the event which is sped up by facebooks “six degrees of separation”.