Executive Summary

NBA 2k12 Marketing Plan Video games are very popular in this day and age, and very few games are gaining as much hype and popularity as NBA 2k12. NBA 2k12 intends to carry out the mission statement of Sports. 2k Sports’ mission is to strive to give gamers the best sports , and best gaming experience on the market, while getting the consumer involved in the process. The objectives that we hope to accomplish in order to carry out our mission statement are as follows:

• Add 3-5 new sponsors by 2013. • Increase Facebook likes by 50,000 by the time the NBA season begins. • Gain 25,000 new followers on Twitter before the NBA season begins. • Have 10,000 participants in the 2k12 #TheDebateIsOver contest before registration ends. • Sell the most units of all sports video games in 2012. • Increase previous units sales by 10% to people ages 24-34 by 2013.

These objectives will be completed through creative television and radio commercials involving NBA celebrities and legends. In addition, we will be using technology to our advantage by using Facebook, Twitter, and even Youtube. This will be perfect to tend to our target market of males ages 14-34. Through the use of all of these strategies, as well as several that are explained later, we plan to increase awareness and become one of the most successful sporting video games of all time.

It is very likely consumers will choose NBA 2k12 over any other game because it gives gamers the ability to use new legends such as , , , and many other legends that influenced the game that is played today. Not only can gamers use these players, but they can also use them against players currently in the league today, such as Lebron James or . This is a feature that we stress to consumers because it is new, and not affected by the lockout at all. This is a great feature that is also accompanied by all the same cool features and game modes from last year’s successful NBA 2k11. The game will cost consumers about $59.99 at most store locations and is worth every dollar.

1 Introduction 2K Sports has had a long line of success in the gaming world, but nothing will be more profound than NBA 2k12. Here at 2K Sports, our mission is to strive to give gamers the best , and best gaming experience on the market, while getting the consumer involved in the process. With the overwhelming successes of NBA 2k11, we will look to build on what made that game so popular. NBA 2k11 used Michael Jordan to build brand awareness and popularity amongst gamers. With NBA 2k12 we not only have Michael Jordan, Larry Bird,

Magic Johnson, but many other popular legends are also featured. With these new legends, and the influx of outstanding players of today, 2k12 will be a marketers dream.

More importantly, NBA 2K12 will also be a gamers’ dream, with new features and innovations that will leave the consumer speechless. NBA 2k12 includes, but is not limited to, all the same features and game modes as NBA 2k11. 2K12 is looking to build off the major success

2K11 had by harnessing what the fans truly want, Michael Jordan and more. Jason Argent, Vice

President of marketing for 2K says it best "We're bringing ‘His Airness' back to the NBA 2K franchise as part of a multi-year extended partnership, along with two other legendary icons —

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — for a special cover athlete collection representing the NBA's greatest heroes" (Gurczynski, 2011). The 2K12 game will feature one outstanding breakthrough, legends. NBA legends have always been something 2K never truly believed would be a good investment until they saw the success of last year. 2K11 was the first NBA game that was allowed to have Michael Jordan in it. “When you’re the #1 selling NBA videogame two years in a row, the #1 rated NBA videogame 10 years in a row, what is NBA 2K11 to do for the next act?

Simple: Michael Jordan” (2K Website, 2011). Michael Jordan helped 2K capture an audience we never expected with “over five million copies sold and over 20 Sports Game of the Year

2 Awards” (2K Website, 2011), and 2K12 only expands on that notion. 2K12 added two all time great legends, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in what hopes to be the most anticipated NBA game and NBA cover ever. The release date is set for October 4th, let the games begin.

NBA 2K12 is scheduled to come out October 4th and be $59.99. The game can be pre- ordered through Amazon, GameStop, Target, Walmart and Bestbuy. The game systems 2K12 can be played on include: PSP, PlayStation 3, PC DVD, PlayStation 2, 360 and . The covers for 2K12 will mark the first time multiple players will grace the cover. 2K12 is allowing customers to pick which cover they would like to receive: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, or

Larry Bird. A side note to picking a cover is only PlayStation 3 and owners will be able to choose between all three. 2K12 is going to be the best NBA video game ever.

The 2K series strives for excellence and advancement over other sport video games. That is why the high quality of the game remains the same. 2K video games always have this special brand image that resembles the top of the top in terms of video games. 2K Sports makes constant improvements to the game play and 2k12 is no different. NBA 2K12 will be adding many new legends and features to keep it on top in the sports gaming world, while keeping consumers involved along the way.

Situational and Competitor Analysis

With many new additions, and popularity bound to increase, NBA 2k12 can expect sales to increase. This is expected because sales from 2k10 to 2k11 increased. In fact, 2k11 sold almost 2 million more copies than 2k10 (for PS3) and this number continues to increase (Thomsen, 2011).

In addition, overall video game sales are continuing to increase (Wilson, 2011). The game can be purchased for a reasonable price of $60 for PS3 or Xbox 360, and even less for other systems

3 like PSP. In comparison to other video games this game is at a standard price, and it is of great quality. The game will be available on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP, PS2, and Windows/PC

(Thomsen, 2011).

NBA 2k12 continues to lead the video game nation in innovation but is fairly new to the market compared to EA Sport’s Madden, which has been on the market several years before our product. Madden ‘12 seems to be one of the most popular video games out right now and has many strengths and many gamers will still be playing this during basketball season whether there is a season or not. In addition, like NBA 2k12, Madden has continued to dominate its market and holds a large market share. With video game sales always on the rise, and a game as prominent as Madden, Madden sales are always high, even this year after a lockout almost ensued (Wilson,

2011).

Madden ’12 has been around for a very long time and has been able to almost perfect every aspect that they would like. Therefore to find weaknesses is very tough but they exist. One main weakness that we plan to take full advantage of is the target market. We are competing for all gamers but we have an edge on them for a large part of the market. Anyone whom is a passionate basketball fan will almost always choose our video game over there game just because of the simple fact that they are more interested in the content of our game than the content of Madden football (Schwarz, 2011).

Madden has become very popular for who appears on the cover every year. It is a topic that is debated and talked about all off-season. This year EA Sports was very creative in taking advantage of an opportunity to get the public involved in such a popular process. In order to determine who would grace the cover of Madden NFL ’12, EA sports decided to be very creative

4 in choosing this lucky player. They gave fans the opportunity to vote for players in a tournament style to determine who would appear on Madden ’12 (Benson, 2011). Peyton Hillis was the winner of the honor. EA Sports did a great job promoting their game in an interesting and creative manner and is currently reaping the benefits of their promotion. Madden has started off with 10 percent more sales this year than last year already (Reisinger, 2011).

A large threat that many are overlooking is the situation the economy is in. Some may argue we are in a recession. Since a recession is threatening, many consumers don’t have as much disposable income, or some just want to be able to save and not spend their money on video games due to their situation. Although the economy isn’t in the best shape, the price of madden has not changed. It is still the same price, 59.99. With prices increasing, and disposable income decreasing, EA sports could be affected negatively (Robb, 2011).

Target Markets

NBA 2k12 is played by a wide variety of people, including females. Female gamers are more prevalent than most realize, making up 46% of video game purchases, but not as prevalent as male gamers who account for 54% of video game purchases (ESA 2010). And when applying this to NBA 2k12, the number of male purchasers will only increase. Therefore, we have decided that the gender we will be targeting will be males.

A very important factor when considering a target market is the age of our ideal consumer. Based off of research we recognize that the best group of consumers to market to would be males ages 14-34. This year we decided to broaden our target market based off of our new game features, and newly obtained research. The 14-18 year old group is consistently looking for the newest sports video games. It is proven that this young group plays a lot of video

5 games. In fact, a survey conducted states that, 63% of 14 year olds boys played an electronic game on a typical day, for an average of 69 minutes. (Kutner 2011). Also, more than 50% of gamers are under 18 years of age (Fitzpatrick 1997). These statistics justify the lowering of the bottom of our target market. We increased our target market up to 34 because of the fun new features. These features allow players to use historic players, and even play against each other using them (Tsukayama 2011). The people most familiar with these historic players are the ones that watched them play as they grew up. These consumers are likely to be more attracted to our game. In addition, we kept a high age of 34 because the average “gamer” is surprisingly about 40 years old (ESA 2010). Also, we determined our target market is very similar to the target market of the NBA finals because people that play basketball video games are very likely to be watching the championship of the sport. According to Simmons Research group, 34.3% of people that watched the 2005 NBA Finals were between the ages of 18 and 34 (2005). This age group also consists of many parents. On average most Americans become parents between 20-34

(Livingston 2010). Parents play a large part in our sales because they are the individuals who purchase the game and/or approve the purchase of the video game that the minor wants. In fact,

93% of the time parents are present at the time games are purchased. Consequently, our target market will accommodate the broad range of 14-34.

Video games and Race have never really been something that we could use to benefit our target market. In the NBA finals 65% of the people who watched were White, 34% were

African American, 5% were Asian and 6% other (Simmons, 2011). This is not a strong telling signal of who is buying 2k games and who our target market should consider. In addition, we realize that the target market of the NBA finals is similar to our video game but not the exact same. With these small problems in mind, we decided that instead of focusing on race we could

6 focus on the idea of connecting people through our game. NBA 2k11 had the second biggest online world for sports video games (Klemko, 2010). Our idea is to promote challenging new players online from not only your area but internationally as well. We should promote building friendships through 2k12 and basketball. This will help broaden the target market because it allows for everyone to play in an open and free environment.

Internationally NBA 2k11 had some success, but was obviously overshadowed by the record number of sales sold in the USA. There is a small percentage of international consumers that may be interested in NBA 2k12, and with the NBA continuing negotiation across seas, this number will continue to rise, but as of now there is not enough demand to target this small market (Groves 2011). We will be targeting all consumers in the USA, and expecting most sales from this part of the world.

“Gamers” are a large part of our target market. “Gamers” are people who frequently play and enjoy playing a wide variety of video games. These people also enjoy strategy games, role- playing games, action games, racing games, etc. But sport games have achieved the highest percent of video game unit sales with almost 20%. Hence why we plan to strongly market to these “Gamers”. In addition to gamers we will be targeting passionate basketball fans. Passionate basketball fans know a lot about the history of the NBA. The consumers will be sure to love our newest features allowing them to solve age-old debates of who is better than whom. For example, players can set an exhibition match and have Jordan matched up against Lebron or

Kobe. It gives players the ability to play the ’96 Bulls verses the 2012 Miami Heat (Tsukayama

2011). We have found that this will be very attractive to passionate NBA fans, and will be hard to pass up given the awareness we hope to accomplish. Selling to these two types of consumer

7 should lead to lots more success and will combat one of our large external weaknesses we are currently facing, the NBA lockout.

Another factor we considered when determining our target market was socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status plays a large role in who purchases the video game because those who don’t have money obviously don’t have the ability to purchase the video game. We will be targeting the middle class who, according to the 2010 US Census, makes up over 50% of the US population. These are people making over $25,000 annually but not over $100,000 (US Census

2010). These consumers have enough disposable income to purchase our game and with all other marketing techniques, we believe the will account for a majority of our purchases.

NBA 2k12 has a large target market that accommodates a diverse population. Mainly our ideal customer will be an American male between the ages of 14 and 34, that is a passionate basketball fan or avid gamer. We will continue to keep our target market in mind when marketing in order to capture the attention of people that fit these categories, as well as make them aware of our product in order to spark their interest. Being conscientious of these characteristics will lead to another successful year of sales.

Marketing Objectives (SWOT) Our Marketing objectives for NBA 2k12 are centered on our customers and their brand loyalty.

Past NBA 2k games have established the product in the video game market as one with quality, innovation and unparalleled realism (2ksports). Our objectives directly correlate to our mission statement and are as follows:

1. Add 3-5 new sponsors by 2013.

2. Increase Facebook likes by 50,000 by the time the NBA season begins.

8 3. Gain 25,000 new followers on Twitter before the NBA season begins.

4. Have 10,000 participants in the 2k12 #TheDebateIsOver contest before registration ends.

5. Sell the most units of all sports video games in 2012.

6. Increase previous units sales by 10% to people ages 24-34 by 2013.

Our marketing objectives work very well to emphasize our strengths and to improve our weaknesses. NBA 2k12 brings several strengths to the table. The main strength is the uniqueness of the product. There are not many other basketball games out that gamers can purchase. A large competitor used to be “NBA Live” but due to the success of 2k Sports, EA Sports has stopped making a basketball video game (Thomsen, 2011). When I asked the senior director of marketing for 2k Sport who the biggest competitor is and he stated, “Fifa, Madden, Elite… Heck even non- sport titles that sell a lot of units. This is a top ten franchise now.” This illustrates that we hold a large part of the market. Not only are we competing with basketball video games but also now that we have mastered that, we are competing with all types of video games with a goal of selling the most units. Therefore market share is definitely one of our strengths and will continue to be until another basketball video game of our caliber is created.

Another strength of our product is its quality. A prominent IGN writer, Hilary Goldstein wrote that NBA 2k12 is, “the most finely polished and fully featured sports I've ever played."

This game is able to capture any situation. Whether it is the 2011 Finals or a regular season game from 30 years ago. This makes it very appealing to the audience we are trying to reach. Any gamer that is looking for a realistic basketball game, or just a passionate NBA fan looking for some fun will enjoy how realistic this game is (Tsukayama, 2011).

9 After examining the great quality, uniqueness, and popularity of NBA 2k12, the future looks very bright. Unit sales along with profit will likely increase in the near future.

NBA 2k12 more experience more weaknesses than expected. These weaknesses include price, promotion strategy, game play and possible lockout scenarios. Price is always a weakness with today’s games because many of the popular video games now go for $59.99. Not many younger kids can afford that price tag without help from their parents, which is becoming more of an issue. Also if you assume your loyal customer base will buy the game every year, we may lose loyal fans because the price tag is getting to high to consistently buy. The other weaknesses

I noticed is promotion strategy. In years past NBA 2K would promote along side NBA commercials and in game promotions. Neither of these things can happen because of the lockout the NBA is facing right now. Finally the biggest weakness is game play. With the lockout the game play would be drastically affected. As of now “Buyers of the game won't be able to make any updates in The Association mode until the lockout ends, when free-agent moves are made and the regular season starts” (ESPN, 2011). NBA 2k12 buyers may look at this as a problem, but this will be fixed whenever the season begins. Also, we plan to de-emphasize this problem, and emphasize the use of legends, because this is a constant that does not change.

Opportunities are a great category for someone working with NBA 2K12 to have. The lockout has actually provided 2K with a few opportunities it wouldn’t of otherwise found. The lockout has helped 2K understand what its brand is and how it can define its loyal customers.

People are still going to buy the game and NBA 2K can do research on those people and hopefully target them more in the future. NBA 2K12 also seized the opportunity to add legendary players to its already exciting current group of players. We can promote and place our product in different segments because of the added legends. Many people have never had the

10 opportunity to play with the greats and be able to fully understand how great they were in comparison to the current NBA stars. NBA 2K12 will be able to see to different markets than previous years and this may help us increase sales while the lockout hurts sales a little. NBA

2K11 also has the opportunity to have some very new game play that could help persuade people to buy the product. There are many opportunities out there and 2K12 is taking advantage of many of them given their unfortunate situation.

Although it can be seen as an opportunity, the biggest and most important threat is also the NBA lockout. The NBA lockout could possibly hurt sales of our product. The lockout could end tomorrow, could postpone the season, or could wipeout the whole 2011-2012 completely

(Olsen). Our product is not completely dependent on the NBA season but will only help sales.

These two factors correlate but the question is, how much? This is why it is a threat, because it could drop sales drastically or not affect them at all. To overcome this marketing becomes very important, and showing fans the features the game will still have can only help the perception.

Players such as Josh Smith are helping with this by encouraging fans to still go out and buy the game (“Lockout to affect,” 2011). When executive editor of the popular gaming site, IGN, was asked how much of an affect the lockout will have he answered, “"Sales will dip, but not super drastic," Miller said. "Especially if they're able to push the milestone cover with Magic, Bird and

Jordan. If they push that way, I don't see much of a dip." If marketed correctly, this game could sell just as much as last year, but there is a large threat to our product and sales (“Lockout to affect,” 2011).

11 Marketing Strategies and Tactics With NBA 2k12 we really intend to identify what would make this game so popular as compared to years past. We found that the three main features that would help us market 2k12 would be the great popularity the NBA gained from last year, the online play, and the ability to play with the new legends. We decided to completely concentrate our promotional and marketing campaigns on these three features. The overall goal of our marketing strategy is to build brand awareness of 2k12 while getting consumers involved in the process. This is the first year that consumers will be given the opportunity to help promote our game. Yes, we will be utilizing TV (commercial), Print (magazines), and radio to promote the game, but the consumers of 2k12 will be our biggest promoters. By this I mean using social media such as Twitter and

Facebook to allow consumers to interact and compete for prizes all while building brand awareness for us. The more consumers are discussing our product on social media sites the better. We plan on making NBA 2k12 the highest selling sports video game of all time using the creative promotional and marketing strategies we have discussed below:

Television is one of the many ways we plan to promote NBA 2k12. We will be creating a commercial that we plan to broadcast to strong male audiences. We would like this commercial to appear most commonly on big time events such as Monday night football. After conducting research we found that Nielsen ratings, Monday night football consistently brings in large audiences and these audiences usually have a large percentage of male viewers. This will fit perfectly with our target market because males ages 14-34 are very likely to be watching

Monday Night football. Since this group is watching Monday Night football consistently, they will also be seeing our commercial consistently which will lead to brand awareness. The main objectives of this commercial are to increase brand awareness, increase our followers on twitter,

12 show the quality of our product (graphics), and start what is known as a “trending topic” on twitter using our commercial. A trending topic is a word or phrase listed on twitter for being the most popular. Users often use these in their tweets and this will help a lot to create Brand

Awareness. The trending topic we will be using is #TheDebateIsOver. We will evaluate if we accomplish the aforementioned objectives by putting together a research team that will conduct surveys, and do further market research. Ideally, the research team will come back with results telling us if we completed our objectives, and the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques used in the commercial. This will also give us information on how well we are moving consumers up the “frequency escalator”. We expect this commercial to move any non-users into at least light users. Also, we believe that if we get people to follow us on twitter, and use the trending topic it will lead to more use, more brand loyalty, and more interest.

As previously stated our objectives of the commercial are to increase brand awareness, increase our followers on twitter, show the quality of our product (graphics), and start what is known as a “trending topic” on twitter using our commercial. A script of our commercial is attached separately, but is easily summarized. Our commercial will begin by showing 6 NBA players strategically chosen from different regions of the USA. Each player we chose is also listed as one of 2011’s most likeable NBA players (Golliver 2011). The players we will be using are Dirk Nowitizki, Derrick Rose, Dwight Howard, Kevin Love, Blake Griffin and Michael

Jordan. Each of these players will be shown working on absurd jobs that all deal with locks.

Many may view the lockout as a threat, but in this instance we decided to turn it in to an opportunity. While we show each going about their daily work, in the background we will play the song “Locked Up” by Akon. Next, as all of these players go to use the locks they will all begin to think about being back on the court. Images of each of them will appear on the screen

13 with exciting highlights from NBA 2k12 featuring each player. Lastly, a final screen will appear with our trending topic on it (#TheDebateIsOver), along with our website, twitter name, and where the game can be purchased.

Another traditional form of promotion we will use is Radio (Script attached). We will not be using local radio. We will use XM, and Satellite radio, which are featured to national audiences. We chose specific stations to feature our radio commercial on. Each station we have chose will be sports stations such as ESPN radio, NBA talk radio, etc. Therefore, we will be marketing on a national level to all sports fans, and we expect many of these people to fit in our target market and show interest. For this radio commercial we will be using Michael Jordan as a speaker in order to emphasize our new features, and go along with our theme. This commercial will begin with Jordan briefly speaking about the cool new features of NBA 2k12. We will have him emphasize the ability of gamers to play with old legends and find out who the best players and teams of all time truly are. This will transition into Jordan giving an overview of our promotional contest. This contest will allow anyone to pick a team, make a video, and end the debate of who truly is the best team of all time. The winner will receive a large cash prize of

$10,000 as well as free NBA 2k for the rest of his/her life. This will lead to brand loyalty and ultimately this contest will connect perfectly with our “trending topic” of #TheDebateIsOver that will be featured in our commercials as well as any other marketing/promotional techniques we chose. The Radio commercial will be as follows:

(Jordan Speaking)

“Hello, I’m Michael Jordan. I’m just here to let you know you have to go get this new NBA

2k12. Everyone thinks they know who the best team of all time really is. Some of you young folk

14 may say it’s these championship-less Miami heat, or maybe the Shaq and Kobe duo in ’02. But if you ask me, and my six rings, I’m going to tell you it’s the ’96 bulls. NBA 2k12 allows you to find out for your self, giving you the ability to use legends like me, or even one of my former competitors like Larry bird, Magic Johnson, or the high flying Dr. Jay. You think you know the real best team of all time? Well prove it! Log on to 2ksports.com, pick a squad, make a video, and end the debate yourself! And even give yourself a chance to win $10,000 and free NBA 2k games for the rest of your life. So go sign up now and don’t waste any time. The debate is over!”

Our objectives of this commercial will be to increase brand awareness, increase our website hits, make our trending topic more popular, and build brand loyalty. Using Michael

Jordan as our speaker, broadcasting to a national audience, and featuring a contest with give- aways will receive a lot of attention and we expect fans to be very excited about this. As mentioned earlier, all brand awareness will be measured through surveys that will be conducted by our research team. We will measure our website views by simply looking at the hits. And we will determine if our trending topic is working by simply seeing how many times it is mentioned.

Lastly, participants in the contest will be providing with information such as email address, and phone numbers. This will build brand loyalty and allow us to market future products to these consumers who will likely be interested. Participants will be sent emails during the contest, as well as after it. Also, we will send discount coupons and reminders of when the new games are being released. This will help build brand loyalty very effectively and can be easily measured by looking at each consumer directly, or even sending these people surveys to learn more about their buying experience. Also, this will move consumers up the “frequency escalator” because they are becoming more involved, and may begin to feel an association with the game.

15 In addition to television and radio, we will also be advertising in popular magazines.

After conducting secondary research, we found that there are four magazines whose readers fit our target market perfectly. These magazines are:

• Sports Illustrated

• ESPN the Magazine

• GQ

• Muscle and Fitness

Readers of each of these magazines are males who fall somewhere between 14-34 (Soong 2002).

Also, we plan to put an ad in the magazine “” in order to target our niche market of people who are just considered “gamers”. Our ads in these magazines will feature actual graphics of NBA 2k12, a list of all the new features of the game, directions on how to participate in our promotional contest, and a 10% off coupon. The objective of this is to once again create brand awareness, make more people aware of the promotional contest, increase twitter mentions and followers, and encourage people that may have been on the boarder of buying the game to actually buy it using the discount coupon. The effectiveness of this will be easily measured by seeing how many times the coupons are used in stores throughout the nation, and by checking for an increase in followers and mentions on twitter. Also, by offering a discount coupon it makes it a lot more likely that non-users become users, and hopefully enjoy the game and eventually become medium or heavy users of our products.

Any good marketer not only uses traditional marketing techniques but also takes advantage of what is effective right now. Right now social networking is very popular and we

16 plan to take complete advantage of this. We will be using both Facebook and Twitter to do this.

We will be using these commercials, as well social networking to penetrate the market, and make people that aren’t familiar with our product able to identify with it and at least know what it is.

We hope that this market penetration technique will move consumers along the frequency escalator.

We will be using Facebook in three different ways. The first thing we will be doing with

Facebook is using the Facebook statuses to provoke fan interaction. We will post debatable questions such as “Who is the best shooter of all time?” or “Do you think Derrick Rose’s 92 rating is accurate?” These questions will be posted just to get the consumers talking and generate fun conversation. In addition, we will post things such as release dates or updates, and encourage fans to also follow our twitter page. The objective of this is to build a relationship with the consumers and increase our followers by about 5% each time we post our twitter name on

Facebook. Along with status updates, we will also post a new video every day. These videos will give viewers inside access to how the game was made, and even player interviews. Giving inside access to this gives fans a feeling of being involved. This will build brand loyalty and help the image and perception of our product. The last thing we will use Facebook for is feedback.

We will direct users to a link that will be featured on our website as well as our Facebook. Any gamer that plays online will be informed of their ability to do this. Consumers will then be able to give feedback on the survey featured on Facebook. Doing this allows us to improve our product for next year, and allows fans a chance to tell us how they feel. Fans will feel involved in the making of the game. We intend to have fans go out and buy the following year’s game and become heavy users, and repeat purchasers. Our objective will be to increase unit sales by at

17 least 7% in next year’s game (NBA 2k13). This is very reasonable and attainable, and we expect to see the quick increase.

The twitter account we created for NBA 2k12 is simply @NBA2k12. We will encourage people to follow us on twitter in many ways. The biggest reason people will want to follow us on twitter is because we will have contests and promotions, once a week, where the winner will receive NBA gear from their favorite players. These promotions will help increase twitter activity along with getting NBA fans excited about possibly winning gear from players. Since the promotions involve NBA players hopefully we will attract NBA fans that don’t play the video game and it might create buzz amongst those people as well. Building buzz is the ultimate goal and this will most certainly increase the followers our twitter account has. These promotions will be all over the web and we will have NBA basketball players tweet about 2k12 and the twitter account we created. NBA players have thousands of followers so the word will spread fast and our twitter account will have followers grow exponentially.

Another way we will encourage people to follow us is through our commercial. The commercial we created for 2k12 ends with a screen shot of our twitter name along with the hashtag #TheDebateIsOver. This hashtag is basically our slogan for this year. We want this to build a growing debate between fans/consumers of our game. The debate is over is a good tag line because this year we added many more legends along with MJ and you can play the best against the best building competition amongst consumers. Having this as the hashtag allows us to generate talk amongst older consumers of the game because they were around when these legends played. We will hopefully put this hashtag all over other things we promote and this will build our relationships with consumers, ultimately growing our following.

18 The final way we would encourage people to follow our twitter feed is using players during the lockout. The lockout has created this “summer league” basketball amongst some of the NBA’s best players. 2k12 will put together a team that they will sponsor by having their twitter name @NBA2k12 on the front of their jerseys and the players will have there twitter names on the back along with the hashtag #TheDebateIsOver. This will most certainly build awareness amongst consumers because loyal NBA fans watch these summer league games and they will constantly see our twitter name because of it. The lockout is a huge loss for the NBA but these summer leagues are all fans have to keep the faith about the NBA. This will most certainly build our twitter reputation and grow our following by a lot.

The three tweets we will send out to followers are:

• Hey NBA 2k12 fans who do you consider the best NBA team of all time

#TheDebateIsOver.

• Best player to build a team around in NBA 2k12?

• First person to respond with who won the last five NBA championships will win NBA

2k12! Follow it with #TheDebateIsOver for your answer to be considered.

These tweets are designed to fulfill the objective we have to increasing awareness. Increasing awareness is the overall goal of our marketing strategy and we will do that by creating debates amongst fans and providing fans with ways to win the game and other items. People love trying to win free items and this will most certainly be one of those promotions. The other objective we have is to have consumers talking about the questions we pose. The twitter questions are designed to have fans not only answer the question but also create a debate amongst fans and maybe even players. The way we will know if it works is by the amount of traffic through our

19 twitter account. We should have a ton of mentions and the hashtag we created should be a trending topic at certain times. If our twitter account is successful it will most certainly help us build our brand awareness, which in turn helps us sell more games.

As previously stated, technology continues to advance. Facebook and twitter are going to help a lot in our marketing but we also plan to use other marketing techniques dealing with technology. The first source of new technology we plan to use is Youtube. We plan to buy ad space on this site and we will have a clickable ad that is the first thing users see when they pull the website up. The ad will be continuous highlights of stars in the video game, displaying the exemplary graphics the game offers. Once the user clicks on the ad it will bring them to a

2ksports Youtube page with a video playing of our commercial as well as a link to our website and twitter listed on the page. This will be the best technology to take advantage of because 70% of all people under 30 watch videos online (Sweney, 2008). The Youtube ad will have the same objectives of the commercial, and will be measured in the same way as well. The only difference between the two is the audience that will be reached. This expands the number of people seeing what our game has to offer and is sure to increase awareness. Also, this makes us unique because we are marketing in a different way than many may think.

Sponsorship is always beneficial to any promotional campaign, so we plan on taking advantage of this. We will be partnering up with Gatorade to help fund our promotional campaign. Any sponsor would obviously want to benefit in some way when giving money for campaigns. Therefore, we will feature Gatorade in our video game, and even include segments just to address them such as the “Gatorade Halftime Show”. Gatorade would be more than willing to do this because the people that will be playing the game are likely to either play sports

20 or at least be interested in them. Any of these people are likely to purchase Gatorade. This is the perfect sponsorship because it ultimately benefits both sides.

Implementation and Control (GAANT Chart Description)

We plan on doing a lot of different things in order to market and promote our product.

These activities will be spread throughout a long time period, and then the results will be analyzed and used for next year’s NBA 2k13. We will use these changes and implement them to make our product even better, and be even more successful. We have a plan for every week to keep fans active and ready for NBA 2k12.

In week one we plan to make consumers aware of our release date of October 4, 2011.

Also, we will draw some attention by releasing our main cover featuring Michael Jordan. Fans will be sure to love this, and we expect them to show a lot of interest. Then in week 2 we will begin to show some of the new features of NBA 2k12 on our website, but we won’t reveal all of them. We believe this will help to gain more interest and curiosity and force consumers to follow our product and continue to check up on our site to see if it has been updated. In week 3 and 4 we will put emphasis on our social networking sites, and will release our twitter and Facebook campaigns. On these sites we will give fans and current followers the first opportunity to enter our new contest, and get the first chance at prizes. This will get people talking, and begin to build awareness, and loyalty. Week 5 will be one of the biggest weeks for our marketing campaign. In week 5 we will release different collectible covers, and finally air our television commercial for the first time during Monday Night Football. This will be when our web traffic begins to pick up, and everyone begins to visit our Facebook and Twitter. We will post all of the new features that gamers will have access to when buying the game. This will be featured on our

21 web site. In addition, many of our contest entries will be submitted starting in this week. Week 6 we will then release our radio commercial and other advertisements, such as our magazine advertisement. This is also the same week we will begin using Youtube to advertise our product.

Week 7 will be when we begin to remind consumers that the NBA 2k12 release date is quickly approaching. Also, we will be using our Twitter and Facebook most during this time, keeping fans involved, excited, and even posting videos. Week 8 is another big week for our product.

This will be the week we release the game, and feature our commercial even more frequently than usual. We will make sure everyone knows the game is released on Facebook and twitter and even run small promotional activities giving away prizes on the sites. During weeks 9-14 we will continue to air our commercials in order to maintain awareness in the market. Lastly, we will pick winners for our contest, and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to keep fans involved and excited. Then all results will be analyzed and improved for next year’s game.

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