Having introduced ourselves in our previous post, we would like to explain a little more about what we do at iQU. In a company that is immersed in games and gamers, you would think that our job would require us to play a lot of games and reviewing them or do other game related stuff, right?
Not even close. Okay, we admit it. We have played some games during working hours (for research purposes only, of course.) However, we are researching another cool part of iQU, the social media marketing aspect. Our goal is to set up a social media plan to increase the amount of business online for iQU. The question is, just how do you do that?
We started with the initial research that serves as the groundwork for our research question, which proved to be a quest of epic proportions. Obstacles like a different language, experience, and a hyper-dynamic market combined with a marketing department that has an incredibly high standard of excellence, showed us that we’re in the big leagues now.
Our initial research consists of mandatory marketing models like DESTEP, SWOT, Abell and many more, but we won’t bore you by going into details. We used a lot of market research material which was available here at iQU. The amount of revenue generated by the F2P market alone surprised us. We are both originally console gamers, so we had little knowledge of the fast growing F2P and Mobile market. This proved to be a big change in mindset; a consumer console gamer has a very different point of view than a B2B company in the F2P market.
As newbies to this sector of the industry, we had to sketch the market and iQU. It’s funny that we were both very enthusiastic about our product, but then it went BOOM! When we discussed the process with our supervisors, the first draft got demolished: HEADSHOT! Even though it isn’t nice to hear, it’s still something you learn so much from. So luckily, the third draft got approval and we could start with the real research.
After sketching the B2B F2P market in our initial report, we could finally start with the fun part: the research questions. These questions are solely about the social media aspect of the company, which is the reason why we are at iQU in the first place. When you formulate the questions, it is important to get them in line with the current situation of the company. After formulating the research question and its sub-questions, we could finally think of a frame work. Our first blog showed a picture of how we accomplished this in a creative session. Hundreds of post-its, a big red wall and two students who were trying to create structure. All in one room and ready for an epic battle.
The red room was territorialized by post-its. Two interns kicking the COO and CTO out of the room. Battle won. Many more tried to claim the room, many failed. So after hours of discussing and thinking we came up with a lot of questions. In the end we connected every single sub, subsub, subsubsub-questions to theory and models as well. The whole plan to complete this quest had been made at this point. Now we only needed to get approval before we could start researching. Quest number 1 has been finished. Quest number 2 begins. Our next blog post will be about the actual research and crazy stuff happening around the office...
