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 begins a discussion of the appropriate forms of advertising for a retail store.

A recent thread on the Game Store Resource Forum (if you are not familiar with it, the GSRF is hosted by Brian Guenther of Diversified Games and is a forum for aspiring game store owners to ask questions of those already owning and/or managing game stores, hopefully to keep them from making mistakes already made multiple times) dealt with advertising, specifically what forms of advertising should he use?  

Advertising is necessary for any business to succeed.  Word of mouth is great and works extremely well to reach a limited target market.  However, to get word out beyond that immediate group, you need some form of mass communication.  A famous story, attributed to William J. Wrigley of the eponymous chewing gum company, tells of the time Wrigley flew back from a business meeting and was discussing his highly successful company with a companion.  The conversation turned to advertising and the companion asked Wrigley, "Your company is one of the best known companies in the world.  Wrigley's Spearmint and Doublemint gum sell at stores throughout the company.  I can’t walk into a grocery store and not see Wrigley's products, yet you spend millions of dollars a year advertising a product found in the pockets of every boy and girl in America.  Why?"

Wrigley thought for a moment then pointed out the window.  "For the same reason the pilot doesn't turn off the engines once we are airborne.  Advertising is the engine that propels our sales."

The problem with spending money on advertising is, of course, that it is notoriously hard to determine how effective any ad spend is in reaching your target market, unless you tie it together with some from of sale promotion.   The same William Wrigley also famously said, "Ninety percent of the money I spend on advertising is wasted.  The problem is, I don’t know which ninety percent."  Unless you tie in an advertisement with some form of sales promotion, such as a sale, coupon, premium or contest or do some form of marketing research to determine how many of your customers see your ad and, more importantly, remember it and act upon the call to action included in it, you are in the same boat as William Wrigley, spending money to achieve something (communicating with current and new customers) and having no clear idea if you have accomplished it or not.

You can, of course, save that wasted 90% of your advertising budget by cutting all paid advertising and opt to go the free route instead.  The Internet, while an incredible time sink, is also without equal currently in allowing you to get your message out to your target market without paying a dime, directly (there are plenty of indirect costs associated with internet advertising, though, such as the time spent to set it up and maintain it).  Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare all allow you to communicate with your customers and reach a targeted market, and do so at no cost.  The trick however, is that your targeted market has to become aware of your existence.  Free social media is great at reaching and communicating to those who already know about you, however to reach those who have no idea your store exists, you need to invest time and (some) money in traditional and non-traditional forms of advertising and (possibly) other forms of promotion.  More on this next week.

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