What Warcraft's wool cloth should teach you about marketing

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I’m an avid gold-maker in World of Warcraft. Like real life, the amount of gold you have in the game is a direct measure of how much value you bring. If you quest like mad and rack up thousands of gold, you’ve got the skills and the time to complete lots of quests. That’s value. If you farm materials like in-game consumables, you’re generating value for other players who don’t have to spend their time farming, and the gold pours in. If you play the Auction House, knowing your markets and trends, you can arbitrage items that are sold for unusually low prices by players that don’t know better and resell them at market prices – and the gold pours in.

What I want to highlight today, though, is an important aspect of the gold making game. Take a look at the top 5 items I’ve sold in game recently:

WoW sales

The first and fourth items are rare cloth that can be made only once every 4 days. Scarcity makes them incredibly valuable. The same is true for item 3, the Hat of Wintry Doom, because it’s made from rare items.

The second item is an in-game pet that can only be acquired in a little-loved backwater part of the world that takes ages to get to. People pay a price premium for it because they don’t want to burn up the time and effort it takes to get there.

What’s really important is item 5, wool cloth. For anyone who does not play World of Warcraft, wool cloth is a commodity. Not only is it a commodity, but it’s an especially plentiful commodity that most early players encounter by the bucket before moving onto more challenging parts of the game. If chess pieces wore clothing, pawns would be the ones sporting wool cloth – it’s common.

So why is such a mundane commodity the #5 seller? Two reasons: first, it’s used by several professions in game, which means there’s consistent demand for it. Second, most players run right past the stage of the game where they’d accumulate a significant amount of the cloth in their pursuit for better, shinier objects. Thus, while it’s plentiful, most players forget about it and move on rapidly, long before they accumulate any significant amount of it.

Consistent demand. High potential supply, low actual supply. This is a profit engine.

So what does this have to do with marketing? How many people are searching for the shiny object, the rare, the Ebonweave cloth of marketing? Social media currently holds this crown, though a few years ago it was SEO, and before that it was email. Everyone wants into the new, the shiny, the really glittery with the high potential payoff, and for those few that do succeed in making the Ebonweave of marketing, the payout is handsome.

But.

But there’s more than enough money in the marketing equivalents of wool cloth. In the rush to social media, people forgot search optimization. In the rush to search optimization, people forgot email marketing. All along the way, there are lots of valuable methods that generate real results and real income, and those rushing to reach Grand Master Social Media Marketer are leaving money and opportunity on the table.

Remember your wool cloth. Revisit the things that used to be hot and see, now that they’ve reached maturity, just how quietly profitable they can be. Some things won’t be any more, but some things perceived as a commodity could still be one of your best sellers if you’re good at it and the attention deficit crowd has moved onto whatever new shiny has appeared for the day.

Good luck farming your wool cloth.


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Comments

20 responses to “What Warcraft's wool cloth should teach you about marketing”

  1. terrygo Avatar
    terrygo

    Chris
    This is an excellent article – yesterday I spent an hour speaking with an insurance company about the impact of social media which created a lot of interest. At the end of the call, the reaction was, thats great, we must look at how we can participate but our problem right now is how to connect customers with local agents. Social media might help with that objective, maybe social media will change that objective but today there are thousands of agents making a living selling insurance and they need a constant lead flow. Business practices do not change overnight nor does consumers behavior who still overwhelmingly buy from an agent. We must learn to better introduce new 'bells and whistles' incrementally and not throw out valuable tools as part of that process.

  2. terrygo Avatar
    terrygo

    Excellent article

    We do have a tendency to jump on new bells and whistles and leave behind more tarnished tools just as we are perfecting them. Yesterday, I presented to an insurance company about the impact of social media and while the reception was good, the problem at hand is still about how do they generate more leads for the local agents. It can be argued that social media has a role to play in this but not without changes in mindset on behalf of the company, agents and consumers and that takes time. There are thousands of agents that need to sell products to meet quotas this month and pay their family's bills. Consumers prefer to buy insurance from a person and social media can help in that quest for trust but we should not thrown away all the great ideas and thoughts that we already have in the arsenal. So what helps drive leads online? It is about providing good online research materials, user driven price quote, and the ability of the consumer to choose their agent. All of these things are about consumer control and that is the goal of social media, so nothing is really completely new. How can social media play here? Getting a recommendation from a 'friend' about a company or an agent would be a good extension and compliment the process.

  3. terrygo Avatar
    terrygo

    opps – sorry posted twice – thought I lost first post – but shows I was serious but typing it all again!

  4. Great use of warcraft and marketing, I like the creativity. Sometimes the marketing profession is so distracted by shiny that we forget the job is to balance all the different ways of connecting with key players. If you remember balance, then you can experimentally move into new areas in a consistent way – building what works and killing what fails.

  5. terrygo Avatar
    terrygo

    Chris
    This is an excellent article – yesterday I spent an hour speaking with an insurance company about the impact of social media which created a lot of interest. At the end of the call, the reaction was, thats great, we must look at how we can participate but our problem right now is how to connect customers with local agents. Social media might help with that objective, maybe social media will change that objective but today there are thousands of agents making a living selling insurance and they need a constant lead flow. Business practices do not change overnight nor does consumers behavior who still overwhelmingly buy from an agent. We must learn to better introduce new 'bells and whistles' incrementally and not throw out valuable tools as part of that process.

  6. terrygo Avatar
    terrygo

    Excellent article

    We do have a tendency to jump on new bells and whistles and leave behind more tarnished tools just as we are perfecting them. Yesterday, I presented to an insurance company about the impact of social media and while the reception was good, the problem at hand is still about how do they generate more leads for the local agents. It can be argued that social media has a role to play in this but not without changes in mindset on behalf of the company, agents and consumers and that takes time. There are thousands of agents that need to sell products to meet quotas this month and pay their family's bills. Consumers prefer to buy insurance from a person and social media can help in that quest for trust but we should not thrown away all the great ideas and thoughts that we already have in the arsenal. So what helps drive leads online? It is about providing good online research materials, user driven price quote, and the ability of the consumer to choose their agent. All of these things are about consumer control and that is the goal of social media, so nothing is really completely new. How can social media play here? Getting a recommendation from a 'friend' about a company or an agent would be a good extension and compliment the process.

  7. terrygo Avatar
    terrygo

    opps – sorry posted twice – thought I lost first post – but shows I was serious but typing it all again!

  8. Great use of warcraft and marketing, I like the creativity. Sometimes the marketing profession is so distracted by shiny that we forget the job is to balance all the different ways of connecting with key players. If you remember balance, then you can experimentally move into new areas in a consistent way – building what works and killing what fails.

  9. Thanks for the post. I was looking recently for a way to farm wool cloth that would require no effort, no thinking, and take very little time. I can tell that if you are looking for a quiet, non-stressful place to farm wool cloth, then one of the Magical Mosshide camps in the Wetlands is the place for you. You'll have to look around a little to find one, but its not really hard, and in terms of Wool Cloth farming, its a pretty good place. On the other hand, if you are looking for farming “excitement”, then stick with Stockades. Pwning dozens of hapless Defias schlubs at the same time will soothe the ego of your over-powered one-man (or woman!) Army of Destruction!

  10. Thanks for the post. I was looking recently for a way to farm wool cloth that would require no effort, no thinking, and take very little time. I can tell that if you are looking for a quiet, non-stressful place to farm wool cloth, then one of the Magical Mosshide camps in the Wetlands is the place for you. You’ll have to look around a little to find one, but its not really hard, and in terms of Wool Cloth farming, its a pretty good place. On the other hand, if you are looking for farming “excitement”, then stick with Stockades. Pwning dozens of hapless Defias schlubs at the same time will soothe the ego of your over-powered one-man (or woman!) Army of Destruction!

  11. lifesofar Avatar
    lifesofar

    Hi! I just found your blog from twitter. I'll admit, I was initially skeptical – I dodn't usually read finance blogs. But this article was well written, amusing, and very easy to understand. See you round the blogosphere!

  12. Hi! I just found your blog from twitter. I'll admit, I was initially skeptical – I dodn't usually read finance blogs. But this article was well written, amusing, and very easy to understand. See you round the blogosphere!

  13. Great Insight Chris,
    I've been making a significant part of my small business marketing practice “Drip Marketing”, which is basically a fancy-pants way of saying automated E-mail marketing. Why?
    Just like wool cloth, many people missed implementing E-mail the first time around, leading them to making similar mistakes the second run through.

  14. Great Insight Chris,
    I've been making a significant part of my small business marketing practice “Drip Marketing”, which is basically a fancy-pants way of saying automated E-mail marketing. Why?
    Just like wool cloth, many people missed implementing E-mail the first time around, leading them to making similar mistakes the second run through.

  15. riders Avatar
    riders

    Hi,its very nice blog and good info.I found your blog on my bloglog.

  16. riders Avatar
    riders

    Hi,its very nice blog and good info.I found your blog on my bloglog.

  17. Great post! I love game-real world examples ๐Ÿ˜€ I don't play WoW, but it definitely makes sense. One question though, when the professions need wool clothes, do they need to buy them in abundance? If each just needs one, how do you work up the time to sell enough in quantity? Also, if it is easy to obtain, why can't they go back to the easy stages and just pick 1 up?

    Thanks for the post. Will definitely retweet it ๐Ÿ™‚

    @yukai_chou

  18. Great post! I love game-real world examples ๐Ÿ˜€ I don't play WoW, but it definitely makes sense. One question though, when the professions need wool clothes, do they need to buy them in abundance? If each just needs one, how do you work up the time to sell enough in quantity? Also, if it is easy to obtain, why can't they go back to the easy stages and just pick 1 up?

    Thanks for the post. Will definitely retweet it ๐Ÿ™‚

    @yukai_chou

  19. Great post! I love game-real world examples ๐Ÿ˜€ I don't play WoW, but it definitely makes sense. One question though, when the professions need wool clothes, do they need to buy them in abundance? If each just needs one, how do you work up the time to sell enough in quantity? Also, if it is easy to obtain, why can't they go back to the easy stages and just pick 1 up?

    Thanks for the post. Will definitely retweet it ๐Ÿ™‚

    @yukai_chou

  20. good post for Warcraft’s fans. The game that makes you a hero. I think there is no person in the world who has never dreamed to become a superhero. I think it’s a good time to sell my spellweave.

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