Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at Free Comic Book Day compared to Free RPG Day, and considers the two Yu-Gi-Oh! events scheduled for the same weekend.

Relaxing as the staff counts the drawer down from Free Comic Book Day (though 90% of our sales come from games, we do stock comics and have participated in Free Comic Book Day for a number of years), and got to musing on how Free Comic Book Day and Free RPG Day differ and just why Konami wants to run two special events on the same day.

Let's take the second one first so that I can think about #1 a bit longer.  Next weekend is the Sneak Peek for the new Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG release, Crossed Souls (which is rather a cool name for anything, much less a card set).  Also on that same weekend, though, is the latest Konami-sponsored Demo Day for Yu-Gi-Oh!.  For those not familiar with Yu-Gi-Oh! Demo Days, they are designed to encourage current players to bring in a new player by offering a play mat and a bonus to the new player (although it doesn't usually work that way in practice here since my Yu-Gi-Oh! play groups are pretty limited and not great about recruiting fresh players).

What's strange about the choice of marketing strategy here is running two marquee events on the same day.  Generally what this produces is what marketers call cannibalization. The traffic that the Sneak Peek generates is the same traffic that the Demo Day event would pull in.  You are not creating new traffic or pulling people in on a different day.  Instead, Konami is spending perfectly good money to pull people in to the Demo Day that would have come in for the Sneak Peek, blunting the effect of both events on one day and forgoing the opportunity to use one as a draw for another day.  Maybe Konami has a subtle marketing plan here but I don't see it.

Back to Free Comic Book Day and Free RPG Day.  Both are among our best sales days of the year but each targets a different class of customers.  Free Comic Book Day always benefits from the release of a new comic-themed movie at this time of year, typically from Marvel, which drives comics into top of mind awareness for most of the nation.  They are not thinking about the comic books though, the movie captures their attention.  Comics are just an afterthought.  However, due to tapping into the zeitgeist at the right moment, the American public is primed to think about comics and the national media is primed to find things to talk about that relate to them and one of those things getting national attention is Free Comic Book Day.  Hence, lots of people coming in who don't think about comics much of the rest of the year.  If we are lucky, 20% (likely less) will pick up the comics habit.

Compare this to Free RPG Day, which doesn't have a nationally released movie driving attention to it.  (No, the two Dungeons & Dragons movies don't count.  Have you actually seen them?)  Instead, Free RPG Day targets our existing RPG customers, for D&D, Pathfinder, and, if a store has developed them, the smaller lines.  Free RPG Day really targets those people.  Am I going to get new customers because Paizo Publishing has released another We Be Goblins module?  Nope, because 98% of the public has no idea what Pathfinder is.  Free RPG Day is rather an annual gift from stores to our RPG customers with the hope that they will opt to pick up one of the other offerings along with their favorite, and give it a try.  Not a bad marketing strategy, but diametrically opposite that of FCBD.  Now, if we start seeing RPG-based movies, then we can talk different strategies.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.