The recent years have experienced an increase in the use to address financial bottlenecks for early-stage ventures and the process of developing new ventures. They provide an opportunity to small investors to support the development process of a new product before being introduced into the market (Gerber & Hui 2013). They make contributions ranging from a few dollars to considerable investment into high-technology production processes. The process has played a critical role in business activities, such as virtual reality, 3D printing, wearables, and do-it-yourself electronics. The development might predict more general demand in the industries (Mollick 2015; Kaminski, Hopp & Tykvová 2019). Regardless of supporters of revealing expert-like expertise in technology-related areas, they are faced with challenges related to campaign feasibility and the technical know-how of crowdfunders to complete the projects effectively and efficiently.
Crowdfunding campaigns play a key role in ensuring that a product is produced and released to the market successfully. The campaigns have completed more than half of the milestones in the development of new products (Stanko and Henard 2017). Thus, they face the challenge of the gap between the contribution to the campaign and product possession (Mollick and Kuppuswamy 2014). Kickstarter projects are important case studies for evaluating the success of campaigns and recommendations to improve the process for successful project completion. Mollick and Kuppuswamy (2014) established that over 75% of successful Kickstarter projects complete their production process later than anticipated, meaning that only less than 25% are completed within the timeline. Kickstarter has hosted major digital marketing campaigns with different levels of success (Ghezzi et al., 2017). Although Kingdom Come: Deliverance has not raised the amount of money other major campaigns have raised in the past, it is one of the most effective ongoing Kickstarter campaigns based on their digital marketing principles.
Kickstarter Campaign
The campaigns are necessary to tell a story and gain support for a production project. Thus, how its designer tells the story makes the difference between a campaign that gains support and fails. According to Ristevska-Jovanovska (2017), an effective campaign should spin a good yarn. How they tell the story will determine the amount of funding the campaign will receive. However, the campaign designer should combine an incredible story with a killer product to attract the required audience and gain support for the project (Dodson 2016). They should promise to deliver a desired product to the right audience to meet a specific need to gain the necessary support. At the same time, the campaign developer should deliver the message using the right elements of a digital marketing strategy to communicate the message to the audience (Hörisch 2015). Successful campaigns have previously raised millions of dollars to support the project’s completion. An analysis of Kingdom Come: Deliverance proves the point.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
The campaign features Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a 2018 action role-playing video game taking the world by storm. Warhorse Studios created the game published by Deep Silver and is set in the Kingdom of Bohemia. The game was developed for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One (Bostal 2019). The game focuses on historically accurate content, which is one of the elements that make it a success story. The story is based on the Bohemian war in 1403, in which the Hungarian king Sigismund gives orders for a raid of Skalitz, a mining village. The target is an important source of silver that is attacked, and only Henry, the son of a blacksmith, survives the massacre. The survivor joins Lord Radzig Kobyla because of vengeful feelings and engages in a successful opposition against Sigismund’s invasion. He focuses on getting justice for his family and participates in restoring Wenceslaus IV as Bohemia’s rightful ruler. The game is characterized by open-world environments, branching questlines, era-relevant attire, weapons, and war strategies and techniques. The campaign is one of the most effective because it meets the criteria for an effective digital marketing campaign launched by Kickstarter project developers.
Warhorse Studios created the digital campaign for the game that they launched as a campaign. They used Kickstarter to host the campaign and reach as much of the audience as possible. The campaign was anticipated to generate £300,000, 10% of the US$5,000,000 budget of launching the product into the market (Sporka & Valta 2017). The primary objective of launching the digital media campaign was to prove to investors that the game had a sufficient audience to gain returns on investment. They decided to launch the campaign on 22 January 2014, and by 20 February, they had made £1,106,371. The game continued to generate funding, though, even after the initial success. The campaign played a key role in meeting the budget and various other goals that the company set for the marketing and the final launch into the international market. The figure below shows how the company achieved most of its initial goals through digital marketing strategies.
Evaluating the Kickstarter campaign
The success of a Kickstarter campaign depends on the ability of the designer to take advantage of the elements of an effective digital marketing project. The original Kickstarter campaign for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the massive cooperative board game, raised $2,049,721 in just two hours of its launch. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the elements of the campaign that achieved its success. SEO is the process through which the campaign designer optimizes the site to ensure visibility when users search for a product online (Murnane 2020). Consumers use Google, Bing, and other search engines when looking for products online. For Kingdom Come: Deliverance, this is one of the areas that the campaign designer focused on to ensure that users could easily locate the campaign when they search online. SEO was a key factor for the campaign’s success since many users located and supported the project (Barbar & Ismail 2019). For instance, the designer used bots to crawl pages on the web. As a result, it was easy for the campaign to be located on the web, and many people supported its development.
Kickstarter campaigns are part of digital marketing campaigns that allow companies to attract backers for financial support. Warhorse Studios recognized the potential evident in Kickstarter to attract backers for Kingdom Come: Deliverance to prove its market potential and gain more investors and customers once released to the market. Thus, the developer needed to take advantage of positive aspects of the game, such as through gamification to prove its potential in the market. Gamification is used in marketing, referring to the way marketers use gameplay mechanics, such as scoring, ranking, and competition, to marketing contexts (Huotari & Hamari 2017). The marketer in the game used innovative mechanisms to send the product to the market to gain financial backing. The approach appealed to the fundamental instinct for humans to “play” and prove the value of the game to the audience. As a result, the marketer built brand awareness, customer loyalty, and profitability.
Gamification played a key role in building customer engagement in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance campaign. Customers in digital platforms seek ways that can control their entertainment. Thus, digital marketers have recognized the need for multiple touchpoints in the customer’s decision (Huotari & Hamari 2017). Thus, they use gamification to build relationships with the target audience and affect the decision to support the production financially. Gamification affected how the marketers told the story of Kingdom Come: Deliverance to convince the audience that the idea was worth supporting. An example is how the developers marketed the game as having solid game mechanics with nonlinear quests and numerous options to solve a problem. The game was a mix of freedom and mechanics of Skyrim, The Witcher, and Red Dead Redemption’s storytelling, Mount and Blade setting, and Dark Souls’ combat. The explanation played a key role in attracting the audience to the game and supporting its production and release to the market.
Another element of digital marketing that the campaign embraced to become effective was embedding videos to enhance the message. According to Beier (2016), videos have more support for digital marketing campaigns than text. However, the video should be relevant to the content and play instantly to achieve the objective. Effective marketers use videos in the same content as the campaign to ensure that it connects smoothly to communicate the message. In the campaign, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the developer used videos effectively to communicate the message and attract the necessary financial support to release it (see figure below.
Whenever they used a video in the content, they would ensure that it was obtained from the video game; else, it would lose its meaning. Research reveals that using videos in digital marketing campaigns considerably increases the open rate. Apart from videos, the campaign creators used interesting and colorful images to make them more attractive to the audience. Below is an example of such an image from the campaign. The images maintain the interest of the audience, increasing the chances of backing.
Customer relationship management played a key role in the success of the Kickstarter campaign (Kingdom Come: Deliverance). Customer relationship management was especially necessary for the campaign because many are competing for the same audience. In digital marketing, Alavi (2016) highlights the critical role of customer relationships management in the success of digital campaigns. The developer should reveal how the campaign is relevant for the audience to support. One exciting element of the game is creating a relationship between the player and characters. The player can become whatever they desire in the game to gain the necessary gratification. The customer can choose how to generate entertainment from the video game, which the creator makes evident in the campaign. For consumers to support such a campaign, they should be convinced about what they stand to gain from playing. The game features that make this possible are outlined in the campaign, including a choice of how to engage with the game, the realistic, medieval-themed, open world landscape, open field battles and sieges, and a dynamic world that comes to life. Customer relationship management was critical in the ad’s success, including the amount of money the crowdsourcing campaign generated immediately it was posted online.
Another element of success in the crowdsourcing campaign was integrating the Warhorse Studios’ website into the campaign process, which would allow the game to continue generating finances through crowdsourcing. By 1 October 2014, the game had generated US$2,002,547 and continued to gain more audience. Besides the SEO, the company recognized the power of embedding the game as a pop-up on the website where visitors could easily come across it. Besides, the audience already knew about the campaign and could easily search it online for financial support. The success informed the decision to continue crowdsourcing for the game long after the Kickstarter campaign. The support also enabled the developers to produce and release the resource-intensive game after proving a viable and profitable idea. People loved the idea and supported it massively since it was posted on the website for backing.
Consumer Behaviour Models and Marketing Principles
Digital marketing campaigns take advantage of consumer behavior, capitalizing on marketing principles to achieve their goals. The principles relate to answers to why customers prefer to buy some products and ignore others (Jisana 2014). Answers to the question make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful marketing campaign. Effective marketers should understand the factors that affect consumer behavior in social marketing and integrate them into their campaigns to make them more effective. Kotler and Armstrong (2008) classified the factors into four groups, psychological, personal, social, and cultural. Psychological factors include motivation, perception, attitudes, beliefs, and learning. Personal factors are age, occupation, income, socio-economic status, and self-identity. Social factors are group preferences, roles, and status, while cultural factors include culture and sub-culture and social classes (Kotler, 2008). The factors should strongly feature an effective digital marketing campaign, such as the Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Its creators understood the importance of these factors and included them to improve customer engagement and influence their behavior.
When creating the campaign, the designers should integrate and balance the factors, such as in the figure below, to influence consumer behavior and increase the probability of supporting the crowdsourcing campaign.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance campaign integrated the elements in various ways to impact consumer behavior. One of the elements of the campaign that influenced consumer behavior was the non-linear story. According to Elsden, Morgan, and Speed (2021), how the campaign tells the story plays a key role in consumers’ decision-making process. For example, for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the story is non-linear, allowing the consumer to choose to be either a villain or a savior. It presents multiple ways of solving every quest. Another engaging aspect of the product that attracted the audience is the ability to improve the character. The designer emphasized the quality of the game in providing different play styles, rogue, warrior, or bard. The player can also mix and match the plays as desired to improve the effect. Emphasizing such qualities made the campaign more attractive, increasing the support from backers. Consumers seek an engaging media product to provide the level of gratification they seek.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Conclusions
The Kingdom Come: Deliverance crowdsourcing campaign was successful in generating funds for the online game. The first-person, open world, a realistic online game featuring players in a Medieval Europe setting achieved most of its objectives for hosting it on social media. The campaign obeyed most of the principles of digital media marketing, informing its success in generating millions only days after it was posted on social media. The campaign has an interesting story about a humble, young blacksmith who commits to revenge after losing his family and everything to war. The player is challenged to wander a world of adventure as fighting as a knight trying to get revenge and persuade people to support his course. The campaign’s creator integrates important elements of digital marketing to engage the audience to love the story and support its development, release into the market, and continuing success.
Recommendations
Regardless of the campaign’s success, the developers should improve its elements in the future to improve the crowdfunding campaign and gain more returns. Regardless of the length of the campaign, the most important dimension of such a campaign is communication. The quality of communication in the campaign plays a key role in how the audience receives and reacts to the message (Bennett, Chin & Jones 2015; Calic & Mosakowski 2016). The campaign team should focus on pitch quality since it is an important factor in the crowdfunding campaign’s success. The team should also observe the quality of signals and preparedness by carefully considering things, such as campaign videos, content precedence, pictures, rapid updates, detailed text description, and proofreading to ensure that they all add value to the story. The quality and choice of videos to play an important role in how the audience receives the message and whether they remain attracted to give financial support (Cholakova & Clarysse 2015; Chen, Thomas & Kohli 2016). They should improve video pitches and increase creativity to have a bigger audience. Many people watch the campaign because of the types of images and videos that the developer uses. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that these elements do not distract the audience from the core message.
To improve the campaign, developers should change the way they tell the story by enhancing customer engagement. Experts reveal that a campaign with an effective story is unparalleled and can attract more audiences than anticipated within a very short time. The developer should include a value statement to persuade the audience that the idea is worth supporting. Notably, the audience should be the center of the focus for the campaign because they are likely to support something that adds value to them. The value statement is an incentive for backers to pledge and support the campaign (Burtch, Ghose & Wattal 2013, 2016). The developer should also carefully select reward tiers and reflect on whether they will appeal to the audience. Another important recommendation to improve crowdfunding for the game is to create a marketing event. The element is necessary because people desire to feel that they are a part of something bigger than themselves. The developer should create excitement and rally others to the campaign (Lam & Law 2016). Thus, they should prove to the audience that the story has relevance and rewarding to them. For example, they can include features of the game they feel the customer will want to enjoy. They should also build credibility and legitimacy for backers to support the campaign.
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