EA, A Leading Video Game Company, Levels Up Their Promotional Strategy with Wiser Promotions Intelligence
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment. EA develops and delivers games, content and online services for Internet-connected consoles, mobile devices, and personal computers.
Founded in 1982, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry. EA has more than 300 million registered players around the world.
Challenges
EA wanted to identify the best way to promote their games, such as FIFA, Madden NFL, and Star Wars: Battlefront, and maximize their sales with a greater understanding of the competitive landscape.
They also wanted to determine how to flight their promotions throughout their games’ lifecycles due to new iterations of many games being released on an annual basis.
Solutions
Using Wiser Promotions Intelligence (formerly Numerator Promotions Intel), EA was able to overlay promotions data for their own games as well as competitors’ games with aggregated online review data.
This analysis uncovered a strong relationship between a game’s Metacritic review score, aggregated from sites such as IGN, Game Informer and Eurogamer, and its time to the first price reduced promotion. With scores usually finalized within three days after the launch of a new game, EA can better predict when competitors will shift comparable titles to discounted prices, and better plan their own releases.
The EA team also conducted an audit to investigate how pricing promotions throughout a game’s lifecycle impacts sales.
They uncovered that price promoting premium editions of the game prior to the base editions resulted in greater sales lift. This discovery will help EA maximize promotion lift, incentivize trade-ups, and maximize retailer basket size.
PRODUCTS USED:
"[Wiser's] promotions data allows us to not only efficiently and effectively monitor the competitive landscape and ensure compliance, but identify characteristics within our promotions that lead to greater sales lift. The flexibility of the data allows us to extract important insights from [Wiser's] data alone, or overlay it with other data sources to create unique views and identify additional underlying trends.”
Mason Kirksey
Sr. Manager Sales and Analytics
Results
EA used the findings to inform their larger promotions strategy.
This includes their approach to delaying permanent price reduction for iterative sports games until the launch of the newer/updated version and running promotions for premium versions of games ahead of base-game promos. The timing of these promotions will be planned to align with ratings of the games.
Leveraging historical promotions data available through Wiser Promotions Intel allowed EA to discover trends in the industry that they could then use to optimize their future promotional campaigns.
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Knock that next merchandising campaign out of the park. Win market share from your competition with price optimization. Understand shopper insights to create better messaging. No matter your goals, Wiser is here to help.
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