Zynga’s strategy to copy and crush the competition could be more successful than it was for even Microsoft because social gamers don’t comparison shop.
One way Zynga creates huge hits is by identifying popular games from other studios, creating a near replica, and then beating the original with a bigger marketing budget.
The fact that Zynga can do this tells you a lot about the audience for social games. Actually it reminds me a lot of the market I was working with while at Experian. More specifically their Consumer Direct division which was responsible for those sometimes cute but always annoying FreeCreditReport.com ads. As you can expect it’s a marketing company through and through, but they’re also a product company. FreeCreditReport.com is your credit report plus a service to monitor your credit. It’s just not a very good one, but neither is the competition. The reason is repeated in the conference rooms and halls like a mantra – no one comparison shops for credit reports. Why spend money and time adding a new feature when that money can be better spent on more ads, on locking competitors out of a lucrative channel, etc.
The service has to work of course, just as Zynga’s games have to be fun but simply put – they aren’t winning because they offer a supperior user experience or novel game play. I could argue that it was very different for Microsoft when they employed the same copy and crush strategy. People did comparison shop. There were articles comparing products to one another, people would argue vehemently about which was better than the other. I never hear a word about which is the better social game.
It’s a new audience
Along the way Experian has faced much better product offerings in the credit report space, but they’ve all failed to offer much of a challenge. Experian Consumer Direct understands their audience and they should, they practically invented it. They started as a private company with a novel idea, give users their credit reports directly over the Internet. Prior to this you would only hear of your credit report when you tried to buy a car or rent an apartment. Experian dealt with car dealers and landlords, not individual consumers. But Consumer Direct went directly to the consumer through the portals like AOL and Yahoo! What they eventually discovered was a new audience - one that they learned doesn’t comparison shop.
Zynga and the other social gaming companies have done the same. Through the social networks they’ve discovered a new audience. They aren’t your typical gamer. They’re more female and most wouldn’t consider themselves gamers. They don’t comparison shop. They aren’t going to read magazines about games, they don’t care about Gamasutra, they enjoy social games that they hear about from their friends or see in an ad.
Understand your audience
Experian Consumer Direct certainly understands their audience. Their audience uses AOL and Yahoo!, they don’t use Google Wave. They typically are not heavy Internet users. Heck, they know the percentage of their audience search for keywords like “free credit report” vs. “credit report”. They know it all the way down to which search engine they use.
I bet Zynga is learning the same thing as I write this.
