A break from Empire......Finally! Ch. 14 - Marketing Channels and Retailing

Empire Arcadia is not a retailer, therefore this week we can finally take a break from this company! My apologies, I have been apart of this company  for over a decade, the last thing I ever wanted find myself doing is writing about them. I mean, I am a player after all, I would rather be pushing button's or in gamer slang "A button monkey".  

So am I a genius or what!? Empire Arcadia is about gaming, so I went to a specific retailer who's specialty is selling games, systems and gaming accessories. Game stop!

  Look at this logo, "power to the players". Oh yeah after reading this you would swear they were not making a profit off of you purchasing from them. If only life was that easy.

See what I did there?
Oh boy, do I have to do all the work here. Well if you read above I just revealed to you that GameStop is a specialty discount store. I would have thought given the name, you might have figured that out yourself. GameStop is also corporately owned, but for any of you looking to buy stock that is very much an option. 

Like the quote says "power to the player". Promotion strategy at its finest. Now just in case you aren't familiar as to what a Promotion strategy is as far as retailing is concerned, I will define it for you. It is the type of promotion involving advertising, public relations, sales and publicity. For Gamestop, they have all these areas covered to the nail! Gamestop has advertisements its sales can be found in flyers on your doorstep, the news paper, and the easiest but largest outlet of them all, online as ads on media sites such as Youtube and Facebook. Need I remind these sites are visit by millions of users everyday. You may not acknowledge the ad but there will always be a subconscious suggestion for those who are even slightly interested or an unconscious  suggestion for those who are not. If you thought their out reach was not large enough, then take a deep breath, because they also have an online store. Can we say overkill? No! but we can say category killer, which is exactly what GameStop is. Is this a bad thing, yeah, for the competition. You see a category killer heavily dominates its field of merchandise. In more simpler terms, majority of games, systems and gaming accessories are brought from Gamestop rather than its competition like "Best buy".  The reason for this, is because GameStop is quite literally a library for games. Their product offering can hardly be matched by any other because their franchise focuses directly on gaming period. Meaning, they have wide variety of products with different brands spanning from the top brands such as Sony to 3rd party brands.


So lesson learned today! If you are looking to get into the business of retailing and it involves gaming, it simply not be a wise choice in this current era unless you are willing to bring something to the table that can reprogram consumers to choose your option instead of what they are used to.