How are we to define “Esports Marketing?”
I’ve worked in tech (inclusive of gaming, for the sake of argument) for about a decade at this point. Many enter the sector with ambitions of hitting that fated multi-million dollar IPO payout. Others for the mission these companies attempt to pursue (at places like Facebook and Twitter, particularly early on, it was always some articulation of changing the very world). The biggest draw for me was something that I’ve described as the “no one’s got that” effect.
What I mean is this: When you work at a big, established company (which I have also done, for many years), and you find an issue, bug, or some other fault in the system… generally “someone’s got that.” Occasionally, entire teams are dedicated to handling that problem/fault/bug/etc. It’s under control, the great machines of industry continue to churn, and so on and so forth.
In tech? No one’s got that. If you find something wrong… that’s now your problem, because none of this has been done before and resources are so threadbare that no one else will be coming to the rescue. Call it the capability to have real impact or a daring-do love for the uncertainty, either way I found this phenomenon to be both highly unique and an attractive attribute of early stage companies.
The developing esports industry is, in many ways, quite similar. If not for the overblown mission statements or ludicrous perks to snare the next cohort of Stanford CS grads, then for the fact that many organizations in this space are essentially start-ups charting a course in business industries that generally don’t understand them. Like tech, it takes a different kind of mentality to flourish in such an environment. One might even argue this requires a different set of skills than what can be obtained from formal education or previous on-the-job-training.
It’s from this lens that, aside from the hype-addled headlines, I believe esports degree or certificate programs offered by universities have the potential to provide valuable skills to those who endeavor to work within the industry. As I had hinted at previously, I’ll be joining such a program - specifically, in the Fall as an Adjunct Professor at The University of New Haven where I’ll be teaching “Esports Marketing.”
What, exactly, is Esports Marketing from an academic standpoint? Well, I don’t think “someone has got that” just yet.
The first question we must unpack is why we even need a framework that is “esports marketing?” Just about any other marketing job in the world can and has generally been filled by a wide range of individuals with even further ranging educational backgrounds, including degrees in “marketing.” This is where, I think, the “someone’s got that effect” comes in – marketing is a broad discipline with dozens of sub-disciplines and specializations. Generally, a marketer works within a team that will likely tap a variety of individuals and skill-sets ranging from marketing research to experiential.
For a developing industry like esports, I have to assume that any given graduate may not be part of a marketing department but may be the marketing department. As such, the first pedagogical principal with which I’m approaching this course is to give a broad yet application-focused education on what I’ve experienced as the most crucial skill sets being applied in esports, ranging from traditional marketing frameworks, sports marketing, and marketing research.
I can almost hear the collective blood of die-hard esports industry folks hitting a rolling boil at the mention of “sports marketing.” The business side of esports is, in many respects, a tug-of-war between the grassroots, passion-fueled early vanguard and “pros” from traditional sports industries. My intent is not to take sides (and to be clear, I’m not a traditional sports professional or even much of a traditional sports fan); I’m using frameworks in sports marketing because the business of competitive entertainment, whether through a screen or with a stick-and-ball, share a number of important and useful commonalities.
The real trick working within such a framework will be the concept of “translation” – how the concepts and terms from traditional sports relate to the contours of the esports industry. Some of the best consumer and business marketers I’ve worked with in esports are those that can relate highly esoteric concepts in gaming to constituents or stakeholders that have limited or no knowledge of either esports or gaming.In this light, leveraging sports marketing as an educational framework carries two benefits – both practical concepts and ongoing training in translating esports terminologies, cultural practices, and technological nuances.
Here too, the overarching pattern you might be picking up from the pedagogical framework I’m establishing for the course is flexibility and broad applicability. If done well (and fingers crossed, because that’s a big if) the skills students will develop should allow them to both work independently against marketing goals or be flexible “all-arounders” within a marketing team. They should also be able to apply these skills within esports or other, similar industries that focus on competitive entertainment.
But why prepare students for the potential of jobs outside of esports in an esports program? Quite simply, because I feel like that is my responsibility as an educator and professional. The concept of esports education at the university level isn’t new, and recent takes have found that some of the earliest endeavors in this direction have had some occasionally uneven outcomes. More specifically, the biggest problems seem to arise from highly specific topics being taught by individuals that don’t have much in the way of background on those topics. This is a disservice to both the students and teachers, and in my mind wholly missing the point – any career path, esports related or not, is non-linear. Flexibility and a wider range of tools allows for more opportunities, and net more successful students.
Esports degree programs exist, presumably, because of demand from students. If esports degrees are to be established in the same framework of other professional degree programs (e.g. law or even MBAs) the supply of jobs must at least partially match the quantity of graduates. While programs like law or business have occasionally been at the mercy of the job market, they’ve remained popular because the respective industries they lead to are mature and established. This is not something that can yet be said of the esports industry. Moreover, these programs carry skills that can be applied to a wide variety of roles outside of (say) law or business.
So, let us return to the central question - what is “esports marketing?” Honestly, as far as I can tell, no one’s got this. We don’t yet have an established, largely agreed-upon framework. I’m also not nearly arrogant enough to believe that this single course will amount to more than a few steps in the right direction. What I can say, at this time, is that it is a marketing framework that must lean into unpredictability, flexibility, and liberal use of high-value skills like research to fill in the vast amount of knowledge gaps present within the industry. It’s one that relies less on passion as a drawing mechanism, and more into building concrete skills and methods of thinking that can potentially yield an overall healthier ecosystem.
As I noted before, formal educational programs are stepping stones towards creating the cultural and social bedrocks of an enduring industry. Class is in session, let’s see if we got this.