Blizzard’s World of Wacraft, the most successful massive online multiplayer role playing game (MMORPG), has recently launched a new marketing campaign designed to increase subscriptions.
The new campaign is based on recruiting friends to sign up for a subscription — and then rewarding the person who referred them to sign up. The rewards include:
- Faster Leveling Speeds
- Exclusive in-game items (such as a mount)
- Ability to summon your friends to you
These rewards may seem meaningless to those not familiar with the game, but to those who are… rewards like this will certainly help bolster the subscription base with either new ‘friends’ or from current subscribers who sign up for secondary accounts just to receive the rewards.
The aspect of the marketing campaign that impresses me is that Blizzard, once again, shows that it has a great grasp on its customer base and what makes them tick and spend money. A large percentage of Warcraft players are extremely motivated by exclusive in game items — to the tune of those customer paying hundreds of dollars for these items on eBay or by purchasing in-game currency from 3rd party sites so they can purchase them inside the game’s world.
Even though Blizzard already controls the largest piece of the MMORPG market share, they have been receiving some increased competition from new games (Age of Conan, Warhammer) and want to make sure that they can retain and grow their customer base in this lull while they wait for their new expansion to come out. Luckily for them, they continue to create a great product, understand their customer base, and continue to innovate in an industry that has grown accustomed to just raking in their montly subscription fees without providing any additional thought or effort.
