Content Combination

If you have a product that you want to reach a wider audience the simplest strategy for doing so is content combination.  That is, to combine your content with existing content - packaging your product alongside existing products to increase its exposure.  The natural route in this strategy is to bundle like for like but is that really the most effective strategy?

I am not a violent person, I wouldn't call myself aggressive and for the most part I would say that my taste in games would be overly childish.  The types of video games I would play would fall along the lines of Banjo Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario, Pokémon, Ratchet and Clank to name but a few.  I would never personally have considered shoot-em-up games and First Person Shooter types to be included anywhere in the plethora of Games that I would play.  Indeed one of my favourite games is called Chrono Trigger and was released for the SNES, a game I did not experience until I was in my 20s - in my younger years I would have seen the title and dismissed it thinking it was related to shooting [which could not be further from the truth]. I was never one for games like Grand Theft Auto or Golden Eye etc.

All this aside a turning point emerged in my gaming habits when I was a teenager, not because I had a change of heart per-sé but because I was given an xbox - the original first generation xbox a.k.a the black brick [on account of the fact it weighed a tonne].  The original xbox came bundled with Halo which was a first person shooter set in space.  First off I didn't actually play it for a while because I had no desire at all.  I eventually sat down and decided it would be a waste so I would at least try it.  I played Halo and I fell in love with it.  It wasn't just mindless shooting, there was a strategy to the game you did have to think about what you were doing if you wanted to get through.  My perception of the genre changed after that experience and I was eventually given Halo 2 as a gift from a classmate in Uni.  I played Halo 2 and loved it too.  I eventually bought an xbox 360 solely because Halo 3 was exclusive to the console and I wanted to play it and keep it completing my collection.

I do have to question here, whether I would ever have played Halo, if it had not been bundled with the xbox.  If I had never played Halo [which would have been quite probable if it hadn't been bundled] I would never have played Halo 2 and I wouldn't of had any desire to play Halo 3 - the deciding factor in buying an xbox 360.  It is quite probable that I would never have bought an xbox 360 at all.  So as far as I am concerned personally as an individual case study, combining content was an effective strategy to extend the audience of the genre to include people like me - people who would never have considered FPS games.  My xbox was bundled with Midtown Madness 3 and Halo.  The former was a Game I actually wanted to play, the latter I didn't.  One was essentially a racing game and the other a shooter.  If the console bundle had been like-for-like and bundled Halo with another shooter it wouldn't have been bought for me.  A console by itself with games I would actually play would have been bought instead.

One last comment would be to say that this does work both ways in the above scenario, there may have been people who bought that console bundle solely for Halo then discovered they actually liked the style of racing game Midtown Madness 3 presented.  So this is just something to think about - it's not always about finding similar content to help promote yours, sometimes opposite content or completely unrelated content can be just as effective at expanding your audience.  If you run a blog, a site, or a youtube channel for example, with a particular style of content, try doing something completely different and see what happens.  You might attract visitors that find you for that content but then discover the rest of your content.