D&D 5E Should D&D be marketed like Coke, Ketchup, or Spaghetti Sauce?

[jodyjohnson]

Choice, Happiness, and Dungeons & Dragons

Malcolm Gladwell on the topic - Text variant: The ketchup discussion is here.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/06/040906fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Video variant: Speaks more to spaghetti sauce.
http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce?language=en

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

 

[jodyjohnson]

Firstly the Moskowitz Prego research was in 1986 so it’s possible TSR knew about it and it confirmed that their D&D (B/X and BECMI) and AD&D split wasn’t hurting them (although the reasons for the split were likely royalty related). Some played AD&D, some B/X then BECM, but for the most part and many just bought both types of adventures.

When 2e rolled out and the redo of BECMI, I think the philosophy may have been: 2 varieties, don’t mess with success. So we got some minor clean-up, and a few common house rules made official. Based on some of the history of 2e D&D from David Cook and Kim Mohan, there was a strong “don’t change much” mandate from the top. I think there was less buying of both here because they became more different, and gamers were starting to be more selective because of the release schedules got much more bloated.

Since TSR management felt like they had already created the 2 best choice versions of D&D they let it go unchanged for long periods of time although twice they released revisions/new options to the game which saved them from the brink of bankruptcy (UA and the 1993 reprints/Options books).
When the company did go under it was more related to bad business practices and not D&D per se (returned inventory of books and dice, over-production, and making products that cost too much to make).

WotC did some market research after the acquisition in the Coke/classic vein. New Coke was in 1985. Some blind taste tests, but primarily surveys asking what people wanted. Now in the Moskowitz model that doesn’t account for players not really knowing what they want. For example in 1999 I thought I wanted 3.0 and then later 3.5. But what some wanted was essentially the “chunky spaghetti” version of D&D which didn’t exist yet. Not chunky as in heavy crunch, but just a variant that some wanted but hadn’t existed in the “D&D” family as a major choice.

The TED talk was in 2004 which would have been after 3.5 came out. But I think it may have informed 4e (providing an unmet flavor for the 20-35% that didn't know what they wanted).
When I go back and read the posts from 2009 and earlier I see a strong trend to compare 4e to the New Coke fiasco. D&D was no longer D&D, maybe it was a good game, but it wasn’t Dungeons & Draqons.

It certainly informs some of the decisions we're seeing now.

1. No edition warring per GAMA presentation
2. Keep 4e in print
3. Not badmouthing Pathfinder
4. Reprint White Box, 1e, 2e, and 3.5
5. DDN as Core plus dials, modules, and options
6. DnDClassics.com - "Every Edition Available Again"

I originally watched the video because Mike Mearls referred it in one of his posts (I couldn't find it again - likely between 2004 and 2008).

I'd posit that 4e itself came from the uncontrolled 'test group' of the 'internet'. Many of the problems and solutions came from the forums (toss in a little "distance from the OGL" mandate per the higher ups). But until the research (i.e. sales) data comes back you don't really know how big that group really is.

Certainly 250,000 downloading the rules plus a sizable but unconfirmed survey response would let them generate some sort of grouping for preferences. The DDI itself generates a trove of minable data.

I believe they are using the data and they know what the groupings are (given the customization of an RPG each grouping can be flexible).

I think WotC can do the multiple editions from their end (essentially they are already doing it - premium reprints, DnDClassics, DDN, keeping DDI & 4e in print).

The problem will rest in individual Retailers where of 6 tables for RPG: 2x5e, 1x4e, 2xPathfinder and 1xOSR is seen as a problem. Or trying to stock the Premiums, 4e, and Next will be too much.

Amazon and the other e-Commerce sites won't care.

And the bigger problem from the players themselves going tribal on the other groups to validate their own preferences. Edition warring on the forums and in the stores.

A thread from 2009 discusses this – with some excellent predictions of what is happening now.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?269298-Spaghetti-Sauce

 

[Celebrim]

All three?

I'm not a big fan of analogies because they tend to obscure more than they explain.

But if you insist on analogies, D&D is like Coke and the 4e fiasco is IMO almost identical to the New Coke fiasco with the added wrinkle that the Old Coke flavor had been made open source and the brand managers refused to support Old Coke but doubled down on their New Coke preference research in the belief that the Brand name was more important than the flavor people had come to love. I can draw lots of parallels between the two - changing your product when it was in a position of dominance, fear of future market loss based on research, attempting to please primarily people who don't like your product in the first place, and research failure to recognize the problems with their sample set compared to their overall market.

On the other hand, D&D is like sphagetti sauce in that with a classic marinara base you can throw a lot of random seeming stuff into it - anchovies, olives, hot peppers, and capers for example - and its still good and still recognizably something that goes well on pasta. Heck, you could probably put Coke in your spaghetti sauce (if you were careful about how you did it) and come up with a new 'classic' sauce. There has never been a single 'one right way' to play D&D and failure to recognize just how diverse the player base was and how many different ways of playing were actually out there ties back to the fiasco of 4e. It's not merely that WotC tried to replace Coke with the fundamentally similar but different New Coke, but it is as if Coke took its full liine of soft drink products and tried to replace them all with New Coke. It's as if WotC had this diverse line of sphagetti sauces like Ragu or something, did some taste testing to figure out what the most popular new taste would, and attempted to replace the whole line up with just that one jar take it or leave it while at the same time failing to realize that competitors could just come in and say, "Errr..if you liked your old sauce, you can still have it. We'll make it for you. And not only that, we'll use better ingredients than those other guys ever did because all their best cooks left the company anyway in frustration with Ragu's commitment to low quality ingredients."

At a fundamental level, D&D is also like ketchup. The snobs in the food world hate ketchup. They are fundamentally convinced ketchup is terrible. Everyone who cooks is convinced they could do something everyone would like better than ketchup if people weren't just like picky kids that only eat what they are familiar with. Ketchup eaters are sneered at, by everyone from Steve Jackson to Ron Edwards. Lots of people are appalled that ketchup is still around and popular. If they could, they'd be like the food gaurdians of France that ban schoolkids from having ketchup. But the thing is, people just like ketchup. It's sweet, salty, and zesty. It's a classic sauce. Ban it how you like, schoolkids in France still want to put ketchup on their bland authority approved school food. Fundamentally, D&D got a lot more right with classes and hit points and AC and so forth than the RPG snobs want to admit, and fundamentally so much of their competitive sauces are just gross or even if they are tasty, not necessarily the sort of thing you want all the time.

 

[DMZ2112]

I refute this premise that there is no best spaghetti sauce; this assertion is clearly contradicted by the existence of Ragu Traditional.

I don't know what's in it (tomatoes?) but I can drink that stuff from the bottle, and every dungeon master should. Iincreases your natural-20 rate by a statistically significant margin. Modifies your pheromones to evoke dragonfear in players. Puts hair on your dice bag.

I think D&D is ketchup, but ketchup in a universe without Heinz. The Heinz of D&D has not yet made his great discovery. It could be D&D5. I think OD&D, AD&D1, AD&D2, and D&D3 show a crystal clear progression toward a perfect edition.

 

[Agamon]

All three?

I'm not a big fan of analogies because they tend to obscure more than they explain.

The question isn't "What is D&D analogous to?" It's "What sort of marketing type should it use?"

I like the spaghetti sauce idea, and it works better now that ebook sales make it easier to make all products evergreen.

Access to the materials to play what you like is great.

 

[Celebrim]

The question isn't "What is D&D analogous to?" It's "What sort of marketing type should it use?"

I like the spaghetti sauce idea, and it works better now that ebook sales make it easier to make all products evergreen.

Access to the materials to play what you like is great.

And here is an example of why analogies break down.

D&D isn't sold in grocery stores.

In a world of Wal-Mart Supercenters and similarly huge supermarkets, it makes perfect sense for not just Ragu and Prego to make a line of 6-10 sauces, but that there be several grades of increasingly complex higher end sauces marketed at higher price points along side them. After all, there is huge throughput, plenty of shelf space, and a large market for jars of sauce. Some people like Ragu Traditional (which I can't stand). Others might prefer Five Brothers Roasted Garlic and Valdelia Onion. To Wal-Mart, it's not a huge cost to stock 12 brands with 6 different products each.

D&D is typically sold as either a small section of a generic bookstore - Barnes & Nobles - are at smaller low profit single owner specialty stores. In neither case is the retailer benefited from a diversity of competing product lines. WotC has to adopt a strategy that is good not just for its customers, but supports its distributers. Whether or not we've reached a point where it can cut out it its traditional brick and mortar distributers without hurting the hobby isn't clear, but my guess would be "No. No it can't." So as a result, the brand managers of D&D have no good choices.

I don't know what WotC should do because I think it is out of options, but I'll tell you what I think it will do which is the same thing I said it would do 2 years ago now. Hasbro is going to shop the brand in part or in whole to see if it can find a buyer for it. If it can't find a buyer at the price point it wants, it is going to shutter the brand or at least the PnP line. The reason I think that is that honestly, it's what I would do as the CEO. It makes no sense to keep the brand going in the present circumstances and too much damage has been done to the brand to recover. There is no path I can see from A => B anymore, at least not through the traditional PnP route. The only likely buyer of the brand at this point is Paizo, but if I was Paizo I'm not sure I'd want to buy the brand unless someone just shoved it on me and said take it. Paizo's on Pathfinder brand is increasingly valuable in and of itself. It doesn't need its historical parent anymore.

Honestly, the only way to reform the brand might be to move almost entirely in to some other product line - something like Skylanders although obviously not Skylanders but something equally innovative - that would create interest in the brand and renew it for a new set of customers. The problem with that is that there is no market for the brand to make that sort of move due to the severe damage that the brand took during the '80's occult scare. D&D as a brand has negative value in the kids market. D&D lost most chance to appeal to a larger audience outside of geekdom decades ago, and it doesn't help that D&D has (as a consequence) become synonymous with neck bearded basement dwellers in most people's minds. In short, D&D is dead, 5e is either vaporware or a rasping death rattle, and this is more interesting as a discussion of how to mismanage a brand than anything else.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I refute this premise that there is no best spaghetti sauce; this assertion is clearly contradicted by the existence of Ragu Traditional.

You don't make your own spaghetti sauce?

I don't think there is a best version of D&D. I am quite sure I could go back and play any of the earlier editions and have fun. It's like eating different types of beef steaks, all with different tastes and textures.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'd say that all three of these things are inaccurate comparisons for one big reason: D&D rules are not an end product. They are an ingredient.

WotC isn't selling a sauce or a soda or a condiment. Or even books. The value that they create is that they make elements that we can use in our D&D games.

Which means they're selling to makers. Crafters. The consumer here is not just a passive recipient of the product, but an active participant in creating value for the product. Without a DM, all the rules and all the lore in all the books in all the editions of D&D are abso-lutely worth bupkiss. Every D&D game is an artisinally-crafted hyper-local experience like no other on earth. There isn't one D&D or six D&D's, there is infinite D&D's.

So this isn't a mass-market consumer good. This is a wholesale market. This is more akin to the stores where Heinz and Ragu and restaurants go to get their tomatoes and their garlic and their basil. The folks who are selling those people their tomatoes don't tell those customers what they're going to use them for. There isn't necessarily one intent for them -- they're tomatoes, they're versatile, use them how you please. When you buy a tomato from your wholesaler, you use that tomato for whatever end point you want.

Without a DM, a bit of lore or a rule from D&D is just a tomato. You can grow these in your own garden and make sauce from them yourselves without that much effort, if you're interested. It's not that special in and of itself. There's a lot of people who can write passable hobbit fanfic.

It is the DM who makes the raw ingredient into something of added value to the end-user (the people involved in any individual game). We make our own sauce. We have home breweries. We add the premium.

That's true on a smaller level for all forms of game design. The game is an ingredient, a useful enabler. The play's the thing.

 

[DMZ2112]

You don't make your own spaghetti sauce?

No. Why would I? Why would anyone?

JAR OF MAYBE TOMATOES? +5,
+7 VERSUS SCURVY​

 

[delericho]

D&D is most like a spaghetti sauce. RPGs generally are like spaghetti sauces.

And, as the story linked by the OP notes, there are certain categories of gamers, and within any given category there is a close-to-optimal version. So there may be a near-perfect D&D, without there being a near-perfect RPG.