Growing the hobby: Why target the young?

[buzz]

I think it's highly unlikely that a person in their 30s-40s who has never gamed before could be "converted" to gaming based solely on exposure to advertising and marketing. That type of conversion is usually based on word-of-mouth from friends who are already currently playing.

More anecdotal stuff...

When I was first looking to join a group after my return to the hobby, I did come across a woman in her 40's who had never gamed before who was looking to start playing and join a group. She'd gotten hooked on Neverwinter Nights and wanted to move on to PnP role-playing.

Also, one of my best friends had never been exposed to gaming until she came to college, and came to love it dearly. Granted, that's younger that we're talking about, but I know she's said her mom would probably be interested too, if she was exposed. Just saying, there may be some older people out there who've simply didn't do any of this when they were young, but still are the gamer "type."

Granted, that may be a small group...

 

[Henry]

There's an old piece of marketing wisdom that says "if you want a man's money, target his wife or his kids." Even in the modern world, this is to an extent true. Without a girlfriend or spouse, would FTD EVER make a flower sale to the average male?

If Mattel wanted a father's money, who should he market towards? So the young have disposable income THROUGH their parents, more often than not.

Accompanying this is a study done a while back (someone brought it up on these very forums, but I can't remember where), that people who are introduced to a hobby while younger, will likely carry that hobby into their adult life, as opposed to an adult who picks up the hobby as an adult. Hook 'em young, just like in smoking, and you've almost certainly got 'em for life. The difference is that we won't lose a D&D player to RPG-induced cancer in 30 years.

 

[Samothdm]

More anecdotal stuff...

When I was first looking to join a group after my return to the hobby, I did come across a woman in her 40's who had never gamed before who was looking to start playing and join a group. She'd gotten hooked on Neverwinter Nights and wanted to move on to PnP role-playing.

Right, but I would say that she was already a "gamer" - just in a different form. She hadn't simply seen an advertisement for D&D and decided "Hey, I want to play that!"

Also, one of my best friends had never been exposed to gaming until she came to college, and came to love it dearly. Granted, that's younger that we're talking about, but I know she's said her mom would probably be interested too, if she was exposed. Just saying, there may be some older people out there who've simply didn't do any of this when they were young, but still are the gamer "type."

I totally agree with you. My point, though, is that this level of interest in older people is more often than not going to come from word-of-mouth from friends who currently are already gaming. Your friend's mom, for example, would probably be interested mostly because her daughter was telling her about it.

Hobbies in general don't gain new blood from traditional marketing. When's the last time you saw a needlepoint commercial on TV? As Henry and a few others have said, the majority of people who have these hobbies learned them when they were younger and "got hooked". Other people, when they're older, see their friends participating in these hobbies and want to check it out.

As a "focus group of one", my wife is an example. She never knitted when she was younger, but several of her friends at work were knitting and so she picked up a couple of books and now knits pretty much every night after work.

She and a few other people in my D&D group started gaming not because they saw an ad, but because my friends and I talked about it and asked them to join the group.

Word-of-mouth works on the young, too, but I think it's among the younger audiences that more "traditional" type of marketing would have a better effect, rather than among older adults.