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 explains why one poster went up, and the other didn't.

We receive lots of promotional material:  change mats, bookmarks, penny cups, temporary tattoos, flyers, postcards.  However, the most common item that publishers send us is posters.  The store just received two from different publishers, one that probably won't get hung since it doesn't do a very good job serving as a silent salesman for the product, and one that went up on the wall almost as soon as we pulled it out of the shipment.

The store has limited wall space for promotional materials as we would rather use most of the available space for either displaying products or running events, so the artwork on a poster either has to really catch the eye, fit into a section of the store that doesn’t accommodate other store functions or do a superior job of selling the product advertised.

One of the two posters we received came from Paizo Publishing and promoted the recently released Ultimate Magic book for Pathfinder.  It features the Pathfinder logo at the top of the poster, accompanied by the Ultimate Magic logo itself and a shot of the book cover.  Paizo filled the rest of the poster (it's about a 2' x 3' one) with an enlarged reproduction of the cover and the tagline "Annihilate your enemies."

The problem with this poster, and why it's not going up on the wall, is that it serves only as reminder or institutional advertising.  It offers no call to action, no selling points, no real reason for a customer not already familiar with the Pathfinder line to pick up this book and look at it.  Granted, a non-Pathfinder player won't shell out their hard earned dollars for a copy of Ultimate Magic.  However, putting information on the sheet about the book such as contents, which classes it helps, number and type of spells, etc.  would have helped a potential customer decide if they wanted to spend the money on Ultimate Magic.  As the poster reads now, what info does the customer receive?  "Annihilate your enemies."  While a worthy thought, it doesn't give much help to the customer in deciding whether to shell out the $40 for the book or not.

Meanwhile, we also received a poster for Chaostle from Chivalry Games, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  Well, I'm exaggerating a bit, OK a lot but still, this poster presents the info I want to see on a poster.  Chivalry Games has shown off and demoed prototypes of Chasotle at conventions and trade shows for a number of years now and has finally gotten the game to market.  The poster shows the box and product name at the top, has a description of the game in the center and actually shows a photo of the game, with an enlargement of a playing piece, at the bottom. We were on the fence about ordering Chaostle but the poster cinched the deal as it can serve as a silent salesman for the game. We have the poster hanging in one of the game rooms so, as our customers play other board games, they get to stare at the poster promoting Chaostle, with information on it that answers most questions they might have about the game.

I’m hoping more companies will look at the Chaostle poster and adapt it to promote their own products, as those posters will more likely earn wall space, compared to the typical institutional/reminder posters we often receive.

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.