This was written two years ago, and it wasn’t the thing I was hoping it would be.
So I wrote this. It’s what I was hoping it would be. Having read it over, it feels a lot like what skill challenges were really trying to be.
Showing posts with label random. Show all posts
Showing posts with label random. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Con Merchandizing for Lyndsay
One of my favorite stories about convention merchandising is about Robert Khoo. Whether or not it’s true, I have no idea, and I’m telling a half-remembered story that I read many, many months ago, but the general idea went like this:
Scott Kurtz has been to a lot of conventions, and when he’d show up at one, he’d arrange his books on the front table in chronological order. People would buy lots of the first book and lots of the most recent, but a lot of the stuff in the middle was skipped. He figured people just wanted to start the series from the beginning or pick up the new product, but fewer people wanted to jump in during the middle and just assumed that’s how his sales would always work at conventions.
One of the many years he was placed next to the Penny Arcade booth, Robert Khoo rearranged his books. He came over from his booth on the last day of the convention and set the books up chromatically. Suddenly, books started flying off the shelves that hadn’t sold more than a couple of units at a convention. When sales started to die wind down again, Khoo came over and arranged them based on the size of the piles, making a pyramid of books. Again, there was a surge in sales. The third time he came by, Kurtz asked him “What are you going to do when I’ve only got three books left?”
“Don’t worry,” Khoo said. “I have a plan.”
When people began to filter out of the con for the final time, Khoo came over to find a smattering of books left on the shelf. He propped them up in such a way as they were facing the direction of the people leaving. When the convention was over, Scott had sold all of his books for the first time ever.*
What’s the moral of this little merchandizing fable? The key to good table marketing is to try new things.
What spurred this little storytime? The lovely GeekyLyndsay** of Dragon Chow fame is going to a convention and doesn’t want to use a table to display her dice bags. Which makes all sorts of sense because, if you’ve ever tried to find an effective merchandizing solution for dice bags, you know that tables, display cases and shelves are basically the worst possible furniture in the world. The problem comes from the nature of bags, I think. They defy shelving units, their strange shape making it damned near impossible to display the full awesomness of the bag. If the bag is lying flat, it looks boring. If you have them propped up so you can see their tops, they lose any sort of clear identifiable qualities. Nothing about this is good. So to be able to display dice bags more effectively, you need to think outside the box some.
My most fervent suggestion is to have people carry them around the con and show them off. This comes with two really key components: product champions (those people who love your stuff and want to sell it for you) and mobility (because they don’t have to be at the table when they’re showing off the bags). It gives people the opportunity to touch the bags, to interact with them, and more importantly to interact with people who like them. Each individual carrying the product provides a testimonial to your product’s awesomeness, and they can go into more detail about what makes your bags more kick-ass than the bags getting sold by Random Steampunk Booth #7. Rather than let the bags speak for themselves on a personality-free shelf, you have someone there to sell, not only the product you’ve made, but the services you’re selling (I believe Lyndsay is still doing personalized bags, for instance). Product champions are incredible people, and I think Dragon Chow has enough fans that it would be easy to convince a number of them to run around with sacks of them.
Another option: Hang them from the ceiling. Get some very long twine and some clothes pins and make a display of dice bags that can be seen from across the convention hall because it’s the only display that has a billion colors and goes all the way to the top. Color-code them so that people look over and see a blast of colors that go from floor to ceiling, and make sure you’ve got multiples of each bag hanging around at the bottom of the display so that you can sell them without having to climb an enormous ladder to get them.
Even more option: Make designs out of them on the cubicle walls of your booth. Use clothes pins to make an attractive design or pattern that will have people stopping in to at least check out what the hell it’s made out of.
Yet more option: Have people wear the bags as hats. Give a free bag to any customer who wears their bag on their head for an hour for you acting as a de facto booth bunny.
One More Option: Get a bunch of spinning racks, like the ones they use at bad jewelry stores that are made of slat-wall on a spinner. Put hooks in, and hang your bags in an easy-to-navigate pattern on the floor. This option is quite a bit more expensive, obviously, but the spinning racks would belong to you, and you could use them at other conventions in the future.
There are a lot of ways to merchandise your dice bags without putting them on a table or arranging them on a shelf. The key, though, is to keep switching things up, keep giving people something new and interesting to look at. Rearrange by color, size, shape, number of items, popularity of items, difficulty in making the product, scent or taste, whatever. Just keep giving people a reason to come back to your booth every day (or make your booth come to them) and make sure that when they do, you pounce on them like a half-starved tiger on a helpless gazelle. Because customers love the attention.
*For the record, I have no idea whether or not this story is true. I also don’t know if it was actually about the people I think its about if it is true. But it seems like a very Khoo thing to do, and I don’t at all think he’d mind if it was added to his already expansive Legendary Character.
**This article was edited to reflect the fact that I am terrible at alternate name spellings. With a name like Kristoffer, you'd think I'd be more conscious of stuff like that.
Scott Kurtz has been to a lot of conventions, and when he’d show up at one, he’d arrange his books on the front table in chronological order. People would buy lots of the first book and lots of the most recent, but a lot of the stuff in the middle was skipped. He figured people just wanted to start the series from the beginning or pick up the new product, but fewer people wanted to jump in during the middle and just assumed that’s how his sales would always work at conventions.
One of the many years he was placed next to the Penny Arcade booth, Robert Khoo rearranged his books. He came over from his booth on the last day of the convention and set the books up chromatically. Suddenly, books started flying off the shelves that hadn’t sold more than a couple of units at a convention. When sales started to die wind down again, Khoo came over and arranged them based on the size of the piles, making a pyramid of books. Again, there was a surge in sales. The third time he came by, Kurtz asked him “What are you going to do when I’ve only got three books left?”
“Don’t worry,” Khoo said. “I have a plan.”
When people began to filter out of the con for the final time, Khoo came over to find a smattering of books left on the shelf. He propped them up in such a way as they were facing the direction of the people leaving. When the convention was over, Scott had sold all of his books for the first time ever.*
What’s the moral of this little merchandizing fable? The key to good table marketing is to try new things.
What spurred this little storytime? The lovely GeekyLyndsay** of Dragon Chow fame is going to a convention and doesn’t want to use a table to display her dice bags. Which makes all sorts of sense because, if you’ve ever tried to find an effective merchandizing solution for dice bags, you know that tables, display cases and shelves are basically the worst possible furniture in the world. The problem comes from the nature of bags, I think. They defy shelving units, their strange shape making it damned near impossible to display the full awesomness of the bag. If the bag is lying flat, it looks boring. If you have them propped up so you can see their tops, they lose any sort of clear identifiable qualities. Nothing about this is good. So to be able to display dice bags more effectively, you need to think outside the box some.
My most fervent suggestion is to have people carry them around the con and show them off. This comes with two really key components: product champions (those people who love your stuff and want to sell it for you) and mobility (because they don’t have to be at the table when they’re showing off the bags). It gives people the opportunity to touch the bags, to interact with them, and more importantly to interact with people who like them. Each individual carrying the product provides a testimonial to your product’s awesomeness, and they can go into more detail about what makes your bags more kick-ass than the bags getting sold by Random Steampunk Booth #7. Rather than let the bags speak for themselves on a personality-free shelf, you have someone there to sell, not only the product you’ve made, but the services you’re selling (I believe Lyndsay is still doing personalized bags, for instance). Product champions are incredible people, and I think Dragon Chow has enough fans that it would be easy to convince a number of them to run around with sacks of them.
Another option: Hang them from the ceiling. Get some very long twine and some clothes pins and make a display of dice bags that can be seen from across the convention hall because it’s the only display that has a billion colors and goes all the way to the top. Color-code them so that people look over and see a blast of colors that go from floor to ceiling, and make sure you’ve got multiples of each bag hanging around at the bottom of the display so that you can sell them without having to climb an enormous ladder to get them.
Even more option: Make designs out of them on the cubicle walls of your booth. Use clothes pins to make an attractive design or pattern that will have people stopping in to at least check out what the hell it’s made out of.
Yet more option: Have people wear the bags as hats. Give a free bag to any customer who wears their bag on their head for an hour for you acting as a de facto booth bunny.
One More Option: Get a bunch of spinning racks, like the ones they use at bad jewelry stores that are made of slat-wall on a spinner. Put hooks in, and hang your bags in an easy-to-navigate pattern on the floor. This option is quite a bit more expensive, obviously, but the spinning racks would belong to you, and you could use them at other conventions in the future.
There are a lot of ways to merchandise your dice bags without putting them on a table or arranging them on a shelf. The key, though, is to keep switching things up, keep giving people something new and interesting to look at. Rearrange by color, size, shape, number of items, popularity of items, difficulty in making the product, scent or taste, whatever. Just keep giving people a reason to come back to your booth every day (or make your booth come to them) and make sure that when they do, you pounce on them like a half-starved tiger on a helpless gazelle. Because customers love the attention.
*For the record, I have no idea whether or not this story is true. I also don’t know if it was actually about the people I think its about if it is true. But it seems like a very Khoo thing to do, and I don’t at all think he’d mind if it was added to his already expansive Legendary Character.
**This article was edited to reflect the fact that I am terrible at alternate name spellings. With a name like Kristoffer, you'd think I'd be more conscious of stuff like that.
Friday, January 06, 2012
Mini Anger
It's like Hors D'oeuvre Rage
So, we got in our order of Pathfinder Battles miniatures
today. We don’t get to sell them until the 11th, but I got to take a
look at them and I have to say, I’m not particularly impressed. It seems that
the good folks at Paizo haven’t learned much from the mistakes Wizards of the
Coast made in their own miniatures lines, and in fact are moving further from a
model that would actually be useful to the consumer.
The product is a single random miniature per box, at $5 a
pop, or a larger miniature for $7. The paint job is mediocre, the sculpts are passable,
and the price point isn’t terrible. What rankles is that they’re a single
random miniature per box.
Game Masters, the people who are known to buy the most
role-playing game product, do not want random miniature packs, guys. As a
person who stands behind the counter at a game store, I hear this refrain
constantly. As a Game Master myself, I understand their lament. Game Masters
don’t want random anything, they want a sack full of painted goblins. They want
a sack of Generic Evil Dudes. They want a sack of zombies.
That last is great, because it’s a product that actually
exists, one that was rather popular. It wasn’t for role-playing games, though,
it was (unsurprisingly) for the board game Zombies. And they had their shit
figured out, guys. They made a sack of zombies, and they sold a bunch of them.
Then they made zombie cheerleaders and zombie dogs and zombie clowns, and all
of those sets sold really, really well. They weren’t even painted, and they
flew off the shelves.
And it’s not all that difficult to understand why. A sack of
themed dudes is invaluable in a role-playing game. It means you can buy a
single product and be ready to sit down and play. It means that you can throw
down with a bunch of similar baddies. If you’re going to randomize your
miniatures, why not make it like Chessex’ Pound o’ Dice? Throw a bunch of
random dudes in a sack and sell it as a separate product.
Players don’t want randomized miniatures, either. A player
wants to find that One True Miniature that perfectly captures his or her
character, that one miniature that says “Olgreth.” And buying a crapload of
randomized boxes is frustrating, expensive and generally futile. He or she ends
up with a bunch of miniatures he or she is never going to use.
So the product we actually need, the product we would actually
use, is three different products.
The first is a quarterly-released Sack o’ Dudes, a 100-pc. bag
of plastic miniatures around a theme. You only need about 5 different types of
monsters to make that worth it. Here’s your list for the first three years:
Sack o’ Goblins, Sack o’ Orcs, Sack o’ Elves, Sack o’ Dwarves, Sack o’ Warriors,
Sack o’ Mages, Sack o’ Cultists, Sack o’ Victims, Sack o’ Zombies, Sack o’
Kobolds (dragon-type), Sack o’ Oozes, Sack o’ Generic Evil Humans. You’re
welcome.
The second is a painted miniature with Pathfinder branding
that has a single miniature in it packaged like the pewter miniatures currently
produced by Reaper. Those miniatures will be the player character miniatures,
the Big Bad miniatures, the I-will-only-need-one-or-two-of-these miniatures.
Clear plastic in the front, cardboard in the back, pre-painted plastic
miniature in the bubble. Put out two or three of these every month. I already
bring in the Reaper Pathfinder miniatures, and I would happily put a
pre-painted, plastic alternative right next to them. And people would gladly
buy both. Some people like painting, and others want something they can use out of
the box. Providing both of those groups with good options is just good
business.
Finally, the third product is something akin to the D&D
Beholders and Dragons sets. A single-purchase item for a miniature or set of
miniatures that is fucking incredible. I want Colossal Red Dragons again. Or a
Jabberwock. Or a Bandersnatch.
This isn’t rocket science, and I’m really dismayed that this
product went all the way from design through to my storefront without someone pointing
out that randomized miniatures for role-playing games had been tried, and
failed. And when someone puts out a miniature line that
actually makes sense, you can bet that’s where my money will be going.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Random Monster
Sometimes I like making up new monsters. When I find a particularly fascinating image or someone says something that hits me in my deep places, I'll usually write a story here, but there are occasions where I see a thing and think "Well shit, what sort of encounter would this make? Where would something like this live, and how would it make that space insanely dangerous?" When I saw this critter, I thought along the latter lines; there's probably a story in there somewhere, I want to see that creepy girl with the too-big eyes and no mouth fuck some bitches up.
I'm imagining a psychic baddie. Like a siren that sings to your mind while you're traversing the already deadly Astral Seas. Off the starboard bow, you see a pair or trio of naked, ivory-skinned women who sing out to you like the voices of a dream. When you come near to them, they feed from you, draining your mind of it's ability to think or act or feel. When an Astral Siren does damage to you, it's damage to your memories, your thoughts, your philosophical reflections, your personality. Even when she's defeated, an Astral Siren leaves scars on your mind. There will always be a few things you can't quite remember, things that sit on the tip of your tongue, but you can never quite get them out. Is that just the effects of growing older, or is that something the Siren took from you, something you'll never get back?
Astral Siren Level 15 Elite Controller Medium XP 2,400 Initiative +10 Senses Perception +10 C blast 5; +20 vs AC; Targets all enemies in blast; 2d8 + 6 psychic damage. M +17 vs. Will; the target is stunned until the end of the Astral Siren's next turn. C Close burst 5; +13 vs. Will; targets all creatures in burst; the Astral Siren slides the targets 2 squares. A blast 2; +20 vs AC; 3d6 + 6 psychic fire damage and the targets take 5 ongoing fire (save ends). Alignment Unaligned Languages — Str 17 (+10) Dex 17 (+10) Wis 17 (+10) Con 17 (+10) Int 17 (+10) Cha 17 (+10) © 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.
fey
humanoid
HP 333; Bloodied 166
AC 29; Fortitude 30; Reflex 27; Will 30
Saving Throws +2
Speed 6
Action Points 1
Psychic Blast (standard; at-will) • Psychic
Mind Melt (standard; at-will) • Psychic
Siren's Call (minor; recharge 5 6) • Psychic
New Power (standard; recharge 5 6) • Psychic, Fire
Pic was straight-jacked from http://lalory.deviantart.com/art/Placebo-161629508
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