PlayFirst at Casual Connect: Day 2 – The Business of Building Engaging Brands

PlayFirst is at Casual Connect! Casual Connect is one of the biggest events in the casual games industry -- held in three different locations each year - Seattle, Kyiv, and Europe (most recently in Hamburg, Germany). The main show runs from July 20-22 but I'm starting this series of posts about Casual Connect with July 21.

As a producer at PlayFirst I don't usually attend the show, but this year I moderated a panel for the Gamesauce conference, which happened the day before Casual Connect. The panel was on the benefits of hiring more female developers of casual games...a later post coming to focus on that!

On the morning of Day 2, our CEO Mari Baker spoke on "The Business of Building Engaging Brands", one of the featured sessions for the conference.

As attendees filed into the large auditorium, Mari told two stories of her past experiences building brands at Intuit (Quicken) and at BabyCenter, both cases where companies built strong brands, focused on the customer.

For example, when she was working on the Quicken brand, she did research by going into stores as a secret shopper and trying to buy competitive products like Microsoft Money. At one Walmart store, the salesperson actually took her aside and said, "We're out of Quicken right now, but I really think you should wait until we get that in, instead of getting Microsoft Money. Quicken is much better!"

Mari pointed out later that this is the power of a brand - even the salespeople are staking their own reputations that she would actually come back and buy Quicken.

Launching into the rest of her talk, Mari called out 3 elements that define a great brand - Likability, Trusted Quality, and Engagement. With Diner Dash as an example of engagement — 3 of the ten most popular games of all types and all genres — Diner Dash, Rock Band series, and Grand Theft Auto.

With digitally delivered games growing at a fast pace, it's brands that will make a game stand out in the flood of games that we already have.

Mari took the audience through the history of Diner Dash, showing how Flo has changed since 2004, and also all the customers and other "Dash" characters that have been added to the DinerTown world. I had forgotten just how many of them — it was a crowded slide!

She also told the audience a bit about new games such as Diner Dash Grilling Green and its 2 player multi-player TouchCooker 3000 - juxtaposing this with XBox Live version with 8 player multi-player, which didn't work as well for our audience.

Mari announced the launch of Chocolatier: Sweet Society on Facebook, and how that game has retained the feel of the Chocolatier brand so well, yet adding social gameplay.

Later, a member of the audience asked whether we only develop games internally or also work with external partners - the answer was "Both!" Mari called out Miguel Tartaj of Kat Games (very talented developer of the Dream Chronicles series) as an example of just one of our partnerships. He was sitting with some of us from PlayFirst in the audience.

Throughout the day and at our booth, people have been coming up and talking about how much they enjoyed Mari's talk.

More later from Casual Connect! While writing this blog post, I saw that actor LeVar Burton was on the show floor at Casual Connect. Not sure why he was interested in the show, but cool he was here!

What do you think of Casual Connect? Tell us in the comments!

Written by: Sunpath
Games in this post: Diner Dash, Dream Chronicles, Chocolatier: Sweet Society on Facebook