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Message: <blockquote data-quote="guildofblades" data-source="post: 3302686" data-attributes="member: 27324">>>Just wanted to jot down a quick thank you to both Ryans for sharing your insight into the market. I find it very fascinating, and disturbing at the same time. You would think an industry full of nerds would be on the cutting edge of information management and use of technology. But having been involved in various retail operations I can say it does not really surprise me.<<It often seems that on both the manufacturer and retail levels that all the creativity goes into the games. Which on the face of it, seems like a good thing for the games and the people who play them. But on a business level most of those people have to look up from their game books and designs sometimes and realize that same level of creativity and effort must also be applied to the management of their businesses.On the information technology side of things, its not always easy to implement as small business, manufacturer or retailer alike. Unless one of the partners just happens to come from a programming background, they have to hire to have this stuff done. And paying contract programmers is not cheap for a whole bunch of under capitalized businesses. The Guild of Blades was forced to start down the path of information management. When we finally decided that building a lasting and stable business through use of the distribution tier was nigh to impossible we ventured into self distribution, focusing efforts on direct sales to both retailers and consumers, effectively letting all products follow the path of least resistance to the hands of the gamers. And suddenly we found ourselves in command of a level of detailed information that we had not had access to, which was essentially filtered out of the picture when dealing through distributors. And we started to think, boy, if I could just do a zip code comparison of sales per title between our mail order sales volume and to that or retailers in the same zip codes and surrounding ones, that could tell us a LOT. And what we found was ultimately that strong sales to one would support stronger sales to the other. And that was just one example of using that data of many potential ones. We are in the process of building our own custom CRM (Customer Relations Management) software so we can automate the collection and compilation of data into the formats best suited to our needs. The next interest set of data comparisons we'll be able to do is compare the user base of our online MMOs and the zip codes of our users against the existing mail order sales and store sales by zip code and see where the overlaps are.I think once we have all of our system in place we might start to reach out to other manufacturers and online retailers to see if we can get data dumps of their customers and sales volumes to combine together with ours to continually build a geographical map of that data. I think it will tell us some very, very interesting things about the hobby market. I doubt we'll ever be able to negotiate a data dump for the leading computer game retailers, but at the very least I should be able to compare zip code data from the hobby side and compare that against the zip code locations of major chain stores for computer games. But we'll see. We may be able to find some enterprising companies in the computer game market that'll allow us to work with their data in exchange for getting access to the results.Anyway, yes, its difficult for the smaller one man operations to integrate the use of POS systems and CRM software and build custom applications to truly leverage the data they have available to them. But I believe doing so will become increasingly more important as a key element of running a successful company in our industry at all three tiers and the need for those data system is going to make it much more difficult for under-funded companies to get a start in the business and survive. A sad thing considering the Guild of Blades got started more than a decade ago on less than $100. lol. I do foresee some business opportunity here for service IT professional service providers who can specialize in going in to set up and customize these systems for small companies who lack the staff experience to implement them themselves.Ryan S. JohnsonGuild of Blades Publishing Group<a href="http://www.guildofblades.com" target="_blank">http://www.guildofblades.com</a><a href="http://www.1483online.com" target="_blank">http://www.1483online.com</a><a href="http://www.thermopylae-online.com" target="_blank">http://www.thermopylae-online.com</a></blockquote>

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