Eight Lessons I’ve learned at GenCon… for Exhibitors
copyright Richard Weld (2008)
I’ve been attending GenCon for almost twenty years now (a whole crowd of contentious folks just went “Yeah, well, I’ve…”) and I must say that while some aspects of it are constantly improving, some parts of it are either plateau-ed or, worse, backsliding. The organization of events seems to have improved quite a bit. The volunteer system looks like it is working out. The exhibit hall, though….
Okay, before it looks like I’m picking on the exhibitors, let me say this: I’ve worked in those booths, and I know how long and hard the days at GenCon are. It is a thankless job full of noise and light and not enough time sitting down. Let’s think of this article as a list of suggestions, then, on how exhibitors can make their booths perform better for them. After all, if any of these tips help them match interested customers with good products, everybody wins, right?
Anyway, with all the time I’ve spent in the exhibit halls over the years, I’ve gotten to the point at which I can tell in seconds (sometimes with just a glance) if there is anything in a booth for me. I can do a first walkthrough of the GenCon exhibit hall in under an hour. That really doesn’t make me special, of course, because many people do it in even less time than that.
Many gamers are laser-focused on one game / genre / product type, and will skip over any booth that doesn’t fit their bill. A bunch of folks walk into the hall, go to one booth, and walk out again. Heck, some GenCon attendees don’t even go into the Hall until Sunday, when they’re done with all their events. I find this a sad loss of an opportunity to demo a lot of new games for free, but if their system works, hey, more power to ‘em.
What, then, can you the GenCon Great Hall exhibitor do to lure customers to your booth? How can you get face time with all these disposable-income-laden game junkies who’ve come this far looking for a good time? And, once you have them in your booth, how do you pry their money from their fingers?
1) The Goodie bag - be in it!
Here’s something that almost always works. Let’s face it, there is always some downtime at GenCon. Whether they got there on Wednesday to get their badge and check in, or whether they just have a few minutes between CCG rounds waiting for the next pairing, excited GenCon attendees like to root through the bag of freebies and literature they’re handed. Many very successful GenCon promotions have relied on folks sorting through the loot before the hall opened on Thursday. Okay, so maybe you can’t give out an entire starter deck the way some CCGs have. Yeah, that’s pretty expensive, but I believe Legend of the Five Rings was the first, and lord knows I went on to collect it for over a decade. Even if that isn’t possible, do a promo card exclusive to GenCon, a miniature, or even a crappy button. Think of it as something to get your name, product and (most importantly) booth number in front of GenCon attendees right as they walk through the door.
And speaking of your booth and its number, put a coupon in the coupon book. We’ll talk about promotional sales later, but for the moment think of it this way: if half of the GenCon attendees read the coupon book (a pretty safe estimate) and just one in ten of them decide to check out your booth specifically, how many potential customers is that? Hundreds, right? Yeah, even if it is a “Save 10% on assorted crap” coupon, it will draw people to your booth.
Finally, a small ad in the GenCon guide can’t hurt either. Yeah, it will cost you, but how many sales of your new board game will pay for it? Three or four? And how many people will see it? I know that every Wednesday night before GenCon, my friends and I plow through the program looking for all the cool new stuff to try and see. Get those people excited about your product before the con even starts, and they will make time to find your booth. Suddenly the outlay makes a little more sense, doesn’t it?
2) Scavenger Hunts
And speaking of getting people to find your booth, GenCon 2008 had not one but two scavenger hunts that involved visiting certain booths. The memorial build-a-poker-hand involved going up to one of twelve booths, getting a random poker card from a special deck, and trying to make a straight flush in order to get entered into a drawing. This certainly got me to go to booths I’d never have visited otherwise, and even resulted in an unexpected sale or two.
The other, even more successful scavenger hunt, was run by Cheese Weasel. They had five punch cards, each one featuring eight or so different exhibitors. The idea was that you went to each booth, played a demo or listened to a sales pitch, then got your card punched. Each completed card turned in entered you in a drawing. Well, heck, that’s simple and fun!
Okay, to be honest, there was no way I’d ever have stopped at some of these booths otherwise. I couldn’t care less about MMORPGs, but I’d listen to the sales pitch for a punch. On the other hand, I wound up buying a dice bag, meeting a really nice travel agent, playing in a tournament, and buying a new board game, all because of this promotion. It works, people.
There is one down side, and I have to be really blunt about this: the exhibitors have to be prepared to present a nice, friendly, and quick demonstration to the people on the scavenger hunts. For the most part (and we’ll talk more about demos later) this was what I saw. Some vendors, though, thought that they could instead play games with / on the people coming to their booths.
One games re-seller obviously didn’t have anything to demo because none of the product was their own creation. So they asked trivia questions. No correct answer, no punch. What the heck? Here’s somebody who has specifically hunted down your booth in order to interact with you, and you’re going to turn them away? Fools!
A much, much smarter booth asked scavenger hunters to flip through the sample characters in an RPG book and pick out the one they would most like to play, and why. Not only did that get the potential customer to flip through the product, it made them think about how they would play it. Genius!
Of course, and I have to mention this, one specific booth ran right up to the edge of a shit-storm this year and is tremendously lucky they didn’t fall into it. This was another game reseller, of course, and since they had nothing to demo they required that people do one of the following: sing, dance, draw a picture, or (if female) hug a male member of their staff. Read that again, please. Holy shit.
First off, it’s not like gamers don’t have enough self-esteem issues, but now they have to humiliate themselves for the entertainment of booth staff and onlookers in order to get a scavenger hunt card punched? Yet that’s nothing compared to the fact that one good-looking female gamer was allegedly given the options of: hug a male staff member, hug a male staff member, or hug a male staff member. Apparently, she used the words “sexual harassment” more than once, and loudly.
Welcome to a new millennium folks, where you just can’t pull that kind of crap anymore. Apparently, by Sunday, this booth was just punching the card of anyone who walked near them. Yeah, keep your nose to the ground from here on out. Or, better yet, take a clue from the booth that simply asked scavenger hunters to read the name of the company, the name of the product, and their company’s URL off the big sign in their booth. Easy, quick, and polite, they got every gamer on the scavenger hunt to at least look twice at their booth. And that is not always easy to do.
3) Booth design - How to draw in customers (or keep them out if you screw it up)
Yes, booth design is going to play an important role in getting people to check out your booth, but maybe not in the way most first-time exhibitors might think. Your booth doesn’t need to be bright, flashy, gaudy or eye-catching. It’s not like you have to drag people off the street to look at it. They’re already going to see it. What it needs to be, really and truly, is practical.
First and foremost, especially if you’re in the scavenger hunts, you have to keep the GenCon-provided company name and booth number sign visible. Yeah, you spent money on a good backdrop. That’s nice. But anyone who has seen your ad in the program, or is doing the scavenger hunt, or is clutching your coupon, will be looking for you by the name and booth number that GenCon has published. It was a real hassle finding a few of the booths in the scavenger hunt in 2008, so be advised to keep clearly visible the sign that all the attendees know to be looking for.
Below that, have your flashy banner, backdrop or display. Put your key product name in BIG letters, so that people who’ve heard of it and who might be curious know right at a glance that they can get more information here. Have your company name and URL right up there, too. Gamers are very tech-savvy, and I saw more than one person using their phone’s digital camera to snap backdrops for later reference. If someone like that can easily get your company name, key product and URL all in the camera frame at once, they’re more likely to look you up later.
Now for booth layout, there are a lot of different options, but for the moment I’ll break them down into two main categories: market stall versus demo booth. In a market stall, you’re going to have a counter across the front of your booth with a lot of product on it, a standing space for your staff, and a counter at the back of the booth with a cash box and even more racks of product. That’s the simplest design, and it works well. But from my experience, a few specific touches can go a long way.
If you are going to have a display copy of a game open, keep it under glass. There are a lot of freebies at GenCon (and as we’ll discuss later, you want to have one at your booth), so don’t let your display copy be confused with them. Also, if you’re going to have a demo game set out, move it away from the retail counter. Yeah, that can be hard in a tiny booth, but a small folding table off to the side keeps the way clear for people waving cash at you. Keep the retail area clear of traffic and staffed at all times.
Also, invest a couple of bucks on a price gun and sticker everything. The time and frustration saved for you and the customer will be worth it. Heck, go to Kinko’s and make up a 12″ x 24″ board with your price list on it, too. Don’t be shy about signage. Do little folder-over paper tents with arrows and exclamation points, explaining which expansion goes with which game. If you have a good review from either a magazine or an online site, print it in color, laminate it, and put it on display. Draw customers’ eyes to your product.
Don’t just get a table, slap your product on it in sloppy piles, and expect people to root through it. Use stands to prop books up so people can see the covers. Open a copy to a colorful page with great art. Show off, folks. You’re proud of your product, and you want to get people just as excited to play with it as you are. Which leads us to demo booths.
The key to a demo booth is accessibility. I have walked away from the chance to do many an interesting-looking demo because there weren’t enough chairs, the table was too crowded, or because I simply couldn’t squeeze my fat gamer ass into the booth for it. An open floor plan, not demo tables surrounded by counters or roped-off areas, will get people in to not only do your demos, but also to watch over other peoples’ shoulders. That’s how you get people queued up for you. Make it easy for them to watch the last half of one game, and they’ll stick around to try the whole thing.
Now maybe you can’t afford a big booth with half a dozen round tables to run a lot of simultaneous demos. That’s fine. GenCon attendees don’t expect that of everyone. But even if you just have a card table, throw a cloth over it and get some comfy folding chairs at Office Depot. Run a really short demo more often, and people will keep coming. Hang a colorful sign off the side advertising “15-minute, four-player demos of the fantastic new game Blithely-Squart!” You want your demos to be clearly visible, not just for participants but for onlookers, out of the way for your retail flow, and generally eye-catching.
Now, a word for you bigger exhibitors out there (though you may think you don’t need it). A large booth may seem like a great idea, but it can be a hindrance as well. If you are going to merge booth slots together to form a mega-booth, use back-to-back booths. Do not cross the aisle. That only works if you are at one end of the aisle or another.
I walked up and down every aisle of GenCon 2008 six times. Six full laps, I did. And I never once entered the Fantasy Flight or Paizo booths. I detoured around them every time. Why? They were in my way. By the end of the con, I was grumbling about them. The WizKids booth, located at one end of the aisle, I’d walk up to, look around, and then cut over to the next aisle when I was done with it. The Troll and Toad booth, which had multiple back-to-back slots, I walked down both sides of and browsed twice per lap of the hall. Short answer: it is better to have displays on both sides of smooth traffic flows than to interrupt traffic flow in any way.
The goals for your booth should be: easy to find for people already looking for you, clear advertising of you and your products for passersby, good display of the products, direct access to the retail zone, open demo areas, and good flow. Strive for these things and you will get more eyeball time from potential customers, which can lead directly to more sales. (Though bribery helps too.)
4) Booth Feature: The Freebie (spend a little money, ya cheapskates)
Again, this is not as hard as most vendors might think. If your goal is to get someone to stop at your booth, even for a second or two, put out a bowl of candies. Better yet, breath mints. I will stop at any booth with the oversized, individually-wrapped, wintergreen Lifesavers. It’s hot and stanky in that hall, and a moment of freshness is worth the time to mutter a polite hello to the person at the booth.
That polite word you get in exchange for the mint is your opportunity. Say hi back. Ask me if I’m interested in RPGs / CCGs / miniatures / funky new dice. Don’t get all resentful about me “stealing” your mint. The mint has done its job. I’ve stopped and given you an opening. Exploit it! Even if I say I’m not interested, you’ve planted a seed in my head. Lots of us come to GenCon in groups, and we talk to each other.
“Hey, you like to paint your own terrain. Did you see that one booth with the stuff? I only stopped because they had mints, but I thought of you when they asked me if I like that stuff. Go check it out.”
While you’re at it, go back to Kinko’s and have them print and cut for you a ton of three-to-a-page fliers about your products. Have a black and white high quality picture, your logo, some prices, and lots of exciting verbs on them. Then, take them back to the office and tape one of those flat lollipops to every single one. People want that sucker? Well, the brochure goes with it.
Yeah, they’ll toss the flyer in their goodie bag for now and eat the sucker. Still, you got another piece of paper into their hands with your name and URL on it. When they do the post-GenCon swap meet with their friends (”I got this, does anybody want it?”) you are there! If your budget is a little higher, get one of those advertising items catalogues and pick something quintessentially useful out of it. Let me tell you a little story about the time I went to GenCon without a pen.
Okay, that’s pretty much the entire intro right there. I went to GenCon between living in New Orleans and living in Japan. All my non-essentials were packed away. Yeah, it’s easy to get dice at GenCon if you forget / lose / are mad at your regular ones, but a pen? No way. There I was in the exhibit hall trying to make a list of things I wanted to come back for on Sunday, stuff to point out to friends and so on, and I figured I’d have to open a vein to get something to write with.
Enter www.strikezoneonline.com. I didn’t know what they sold, and at the time I didn’t care. I grabbed one of their freebie pens, pretended to peruse the single miniatures and magic cards, said thanks to the guy, and wandered off. All con long, people were asking me where I’d found a pen. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who forgot to bring something to write with.
After I’d pointed at least two dozen people in the direction of their booth, I had their name permanently etched in my memory. Two years later, when I decided to get into HeroClix, I knew by heart the URL of a company that sold singles. Did they know that would happen when they put the pens out? Of course not. But, whereas I would have long since thrown out a lapel button with their name on it, the pen still lives in a jar by the phone. And I ordered from their webpage twice in the last three months.
Booth freebies can be done cheaply and can have a tremendous impact. A candy will get someone to stop and say hi to you. A flyer (maybe with a little candy to help it get picked up) may be seen by several people before it gets trashed (or hopefully recycled). A useful item, such as a mechanical pencil, won’t get eaten or thrown out. You could have something with your name on it passed around tables all over GenCon, as people keep score or update their character sheets. Each such item might be seen and used by several people at the con, and the availability of same at your booth may keep people coming back. All that can be done for under $100.
Last but not least, we have the more upscale promo card / piece. If you have a collectible game of any sort (CCG, pocket models, miniatures, whatever), you should be handing out cards / pieces to hook people. Even if this means cracking open a bunch of boosters and pouring the contents onto your table, people will be attracted by the pretty colors and will pick them up. They walk away with a card / miniature from your game. Maybe they pitch the piece, but on the other hand maybe they get hooked or pass it on.
There is also a golden opportunity to have a “Con exclusive” promo. I have a hard time contemplating any collectible game that doesn’t do this despite the cost. Face it, this is the age of ebay, and if people see a con exclusive item, they’ll want to get it and turn it around for profit. Ah, but then they’ll want two: one for ebay and one for themselves. And as long as they have the promo, they really ought to buy the starter… Promo items have gotten me to buy into one CMG, two board games, and at least five CCGs off the top of my head. Even if you don’t give the exclusive away for free, there you can still use it to up a potential customer’s interest.
5) Expanding Your Promotions: Sales
Every gamer knows that most game companies aren’t rolling in dough. Margins are tight, and the only way to make up for that is by dealing in WotC-level volume. The flip side of this, though, is that every gamer has a limited budget to spend at GenCon, and they have to choose wisely. Your goal is to make the offer at your booth so good that they simply cannot pass on it.
The “Con exclusive free with any purchase” helps a lot. I kick myself every time I remember how I only got two double-sided Heroclix / Horrorclix maps at the Wizkids GenCon 2007 booth. They were free with any purchase and I should have gone through that line a dozens times, buying the lowest-cost item each time just to get the maps. Everyone I know wants one, and I could have supplied them all. Stupid!
At GenCon 2008, my friend didn’t make it to the Giants in the Playground booth in time to buy the new Order of the Stick book and get the con exclusive refrigerator magnet. Boy is she ticked. Sure, she didn’t need to buy the book that weekend, any more than I would have needed the cheap boosters from Wizkids. But the offer was good enough to get us to allocate a chunk of our limited GenCon budgets to those specific booths.
You want to do something like that. Maybe it’s a “buy the core set, get the expansion for $5 off” deal. Maybe it’s a question of getting the book / card signed by the artist. Maybe you offer a code for exclusive content on your web page (if they create an account and give you their mailing address, haha), but whatever it is, you need to find a way to beat the inherent urge to wait until they get home and then order it through Amazon. Maybe order it, that is. If no good DVD boxed set is coming out that month.
A special offer at the booth (and don’t forget that everyone gets a coupon book in their goodie bag to help you advertise this offer) can mean the difference between selling out of your hot new game and having to lug it all home on Sunday evening. It isn’t the only way to exchange savings on your product for more consumer buzz, though.
6) Expanding Your Promotion: Tournaments
Many, many moons ago, the OverPower CCG launched with a super-simple promotion. Play the demo and you get a deck. Oh, and did we mention there is a tournament? My friends and I tried the game, liked it, and cleared room in our schedules for the tourney. Max did really well (beating me in the round we were paired up) and even though none of us got all that far, we were excited about this new game and couldn’t wait to play it again.
Jump forward a few years, to the bitter end days of Atlas’ On the Edge CCG, and they pulled this trick back out of the bag. Play the demo, and you get a deck. Play the tournament, and get a combo box of starters and boosters… more than enough for you and some friends. My entire play group at the time got in on this promotion, and while they were basically shoveling a losing game out the door (instead of into the furnace), we went on to buy more boxes. I’m sure it was an emotionally-tough thing for them to do, but had they done something like it sooner, that might have made a big difference for them.
Jump forward again to GenCon 2008, and a board game called Vineta. Thursday morning my friend Bill and I were doing the Cheese Weasel scavenger hunt, and one of the booths we had to stop at was Immortal Eyes. For their punch, we played a demo of this cool new board game. Oh, and did we mention that everyone who plays in the tournament gets a copy…
Bill and I went straight to the event ticket line, only to find out that the twenty-person first round events on Thursday and Friday were already sold out. We bought the last three tickets available for Saturday, even though we didn’t yet know who in our group would be playing. We just knew that we liked the game and wanted it. Bill actually couldn’t make it, so he recruited his sister’s friend, Heather, and I recruited my friend Jennifer. By playing in the tournament, we scored three copies of the game between us.
Ah, but our gaming group consists of more than half a dozen households. We’ve played the game since we got back, and I know more sales will be in the offing. Sure, the game wasn’t quite free (we had to pay for the tickets), but there was a line of people holding generics who wanted in on this game. Since they didn’t get free copies, they’d just have to go buy them…. By the time we went to pick up our free copies of Vineta at the booth after we played on Saturday, they were almost sold out of their second shipment. Wouldn’t it be nice to get that kind of response to your game?
Of course, you may be thinking you’re on way too tight a budget to be giving away sample cards, let alone full games. That’s completely understandable. So what can you do? Give away the experience of the game.
7) Booth Features: Demos
A good demo can make or break a game’s appearance at GenCon. The problem most companies have is that they have no clue how to do a demo that people will enjoy and learn from. Demos are either too long, too complicated, show off negative aspects (aka holes) in the game, or wind up as tedious slog-fests. Congratulations, you’ve just turned a potential customer into someone who will tell all their friends NOT to try your game. Want to know the two big secrets about demo games? First, keep them short and tight. Second, rig the hell out of them.
The best demo kit I have ever seen belonged to the Magi-Nation CCG. Each player had a trimmed deck of 17 cards, numbered 1-17. Under that was a play mat with sample card images, and a very streamlined explanation of the rules and turn order. I used to run demos for this game at cons, and I could show an interested player all the card types, the turn order, and do a simple walkthrough in ten minutes flat. At the end, they got to keep the deck. Plus, if I handed them the right deck (of the 2-3 different ones I had on hand), I could ensure they’d win. They left with a small selection of cards, a promotional flyer, and a positive experience.
Now multiply that by six times an hour, eight hours a day, four days of GenCon and the number of demo spaces / staffers you have. And really, speed is of the essence in demos. There are so many things to see and do at GenCon that you should feel grateful if someone is going to sit in your booth for ten minutes. Fifteen? Pure luck. Twenty-five? Yeah, right.
My friends and I have developed a set of guidelines: we’ll do a five-minute demo of anything, even if it looks like crap or is a type of game we never play. We’ll do a ten-minute demo of a new game similar to what we like to play, if we’re not in a rush. After ten minutes of almost any demo, we suddenly produce an excuse to be elsewhere. Some of us are even proud of the creativity of our excuses.
“Oh dear, is it that time already? I better go take my shot!”
“I’m sorry, but I think this game is against my religion.”
“I left the cat in the oven and it needs another basting…”
The point here is that people feel absolutely no loyalty to your demos. If you can’t wow them in ten minutes, you’d better be offering a hell of a bribe to make up for their spent time. If there is a $10+ reward, I’ll stay as long as 25 minutes, but that’s the absolute limit. For that, I expect a deck of your CCG, a coupon for a big discount off a game I was already planning to buy, or something on that level.
The best thing you can do, really, is keep the demos short and tight. I don’t know why vendors keep trying to show me their entire game, from setup through denouement. I don’t need to see that it can be set up in “just 20 minutes,” I just need to see the good bits. This is where rigging comes in. In the CCG example above, we did resource allocation, spell casting, card management, and combat, all in the first five minutes. From there, I talked about different factions, tuned starters, and how to get involved in the game’s community.
For a board game, you want to pick a point in the game that is action-packed, can be easily explained, and which you can reset to between demos. Just as a for-instance, Mayfair Games runs demos of Euro Rails, but their idea of a demo is to get people to sit down and play a full game. Even though they have lot of tables, their demos run for as much as an hour, and it’s hard to get in on one. I spent almost an hour in their booth at GenCon 2008 before a table opened up for a game I didn’t even want to play.
What if, instead, they laid out four-player set-ups of Euro Rails with most of the lines already drawn. Each player is given one card with three options for their possible runs (Coal to Newcastle, Fruit to Madrid, Steel to Rome), some money, and a crayon. Their token is placed on the map somewhere in the middle. The demo staff member quickly explains the concepts and rules, then the players get to make some decisions.
See, they can’t complete any of the runs without building some track. Maybe they need to connect their rails to a source of Coal, or maybe they need to build a line to Rome. Either way, they choose one of their possible runs, build their track, go pick up what they need, and deliver it to the destination. Every player gets to make at least one delivery, and when the fourth person drops off their load, the player with the highest cash total wins the demo.
This might go over ten minutes, but Mayfair already has a good demo rewards ribbon program in place, so people would likely stick around a bit longer. The important thing is that everyone learned the rules, saw the game, built track, picked up cargo, and made a delivery. A streamlined 15-minute demo with four players means reaching and entertaining more potential customers than an hour-long demo. Ah, but this kind of thing takes a special kind of staff.
Booth Features: The Staff
Finally, we come to the most important, yet most often overlooked part of your booth: the people in it. From small publishers to major stalwarts of the gaming industry, every booth needs people in it. Smiling, knowledgeable, outgoing people are the key.
Yes, staffing a booth in the Great Hall is a lot of hard work and by the end of each day, your staff will be running low on happy thoughts. That’s perfectly fair. But you want to recruit people who at least start off with some charm. We all know gamers who look down on everyone who can’t speak Klingon / paint minis / win a CCG tourney as below them. Don’t hire these people.
Recruit folks who understand that the goal of your booth is to move product, not to show how cool they are. When I’m walking down the aisles, I am not immune to a good sales pitch from a guy with a big smile. Sure, it may not be a sale, but I’ll stop and listen. You want to get people in your booth who won’t just sit in the chair and wait for a sale to come to them.
The best I ever saw of this was the first couple years of Crystal Castle at GenCon. I am not 100% sure of this, but I recall being told that the pitch man was the owner’s father. Whatever the relationship, this guy was fantastic. It was like Professor Harold Hill in the Music Man. He could have sold me my own shoes. I really didn’t need dice that first year they were there, but I left their booth with some.
Okay, maybe not every booth is going to have a guy like this in it, but at least make sure you have enough salespeople to staff your booth. Sadly, every year you see a lot of booths that have too few people. Especially if you’re a small company who are running their first booth at GenCon, finding enough staff people can be really hard. Your booth is so tiny, and it seems like there’s no way you’d need more than one person, right?
Wrong. You need at least one person taking money at all times. Even in the smallest booth, two is better. Of course, if you’re doing demos, you need somebody who can focus exclusively on that. A staffer trying to run a demo and sell product at the same time winds up frustrating all of your customers, and sales will reflect that. If they’re not currently running a demo, they should be outside the booth trying to drag people.
Two people is the minimum for most booths (two sales or maybe one sales and one demo), but since having demos is good, try to get three people in the booth at any one time (two sales and one demo). As your booth grows, so do your numbers, but you should always have enough people taking money to accommodate multiple people and avoid frustrating clots, plus one person running demos per table.
Where do you get all these people? Dragoon your friends, family, and gaming group into helping you. Heck, many of these people were going to GenCon anyway. Get them exhibitor badges, or buy them lunch, or whatever it takes. Maybe some of them can only commit to help you for a little while. Take it. Come up with a duty roster. Heck, shorter shifts are better, as you’ll need to give them some downtime.
Whatever you do, don’t hire “booth bunnies.” Yeah, it’s a long-standing tradition to stock your booth with babes to draw in the stereotypical social-awkward male gamer. Dying of the bubonic plague was a tradition too, but nobody seems to mind discontinuing that one.
Overlooking, for the moment, the large and growing number of female gamers who couldn’t care less that Miss Perky-Boobs smiled at them, even the gamer who most fits the stereotype is still going to want some information about this game he’s looking at. Your booth and demo staff need to be well-versed in your products, able to answer complicated questions, and be familiar with how the products compare to other ones on the market.
I sat in on a CCG demo once where the person running the demo had been hired for the day, had no idea how to do anything but the demo, and had never heard of Pokemon, of which this game was a total clone. By the time I was five minutes into the sample hand, I knew more about the game than they did. How does that make the exhibitor look? Pretty low-class.
No, you want to staff your booth with the people from your office. Even if your receptionist isn’t much of a gamer, they still know more about the product than somebody you get from central casting. Plus, they might really like a trip to Indianapolis. Get a lot of friendly people who know your product to run your booth.
In Summation
We all know that having a booth in the GenCon Great Hall is like going off to war, or at least like a war game. It’s a long and grueling process, and many companies live or die by their products release performance in Indy. As much as that sucks, it is a fact of the gaming industry. So, if you’re going to run a booth, you need to take every unfair advantage you can get to separate us, the gaming public, from our money. Give us what we want, and you just might get that cash.
We want to see your game. We want to ask you questions. We want a smile, and courtesy. And, yes, we all want a little something extra. That’s a petty but very real part of human nature. So is the fact that we’re all in hurry, and we don’t know yet how wonderful your game is. You need to find some way to get our attention. Or, better yet, find every way to get our attention. After all, if we never hear your pitch, or if we don’t like the experience we have, you’ve lost the game.
