So You’ve Alienated Half of Your Audience – What Next?

“When creators can sense a demand for something new, an untapped potential, and they have the guts to go for it, despite the risk, then they have a chance of disrupting the market.”

That’s blogger Anjin Anhut, in his article “Why Marketers Fear the Female Geek,” talking generally about reaching the unreachable and more specifically about how so-called geek media can still reach out to the under-served female half of its audience.

The inspiration for Anhut’s piece is a recent interview with longtime animation veteran Paul Dini (“Batman: The Animated Series,” “Justice League”) who railed against network executives and marketers for only targeting boys with their slate of animated programming. The reasoning – which Anhut breaks down here using math – is that it’s easier to market to boys, therefore the networks would simply omit girls from their marketing. This, in turn, creates the false perception that girls aren’t the audience for geek properties.

Dini pours his heart out:

“It’s like, ‘We don’t want the girls because the girls won’t buy toys.’ We had a whole… we had a whole, a merchandise line for Tower Prep that they s***canned before it ever got off the launching pad, because it’s like, ‘Boys, boys, boys. Boys buy the little spinny tops, they but the action figures, girls buy princesses, we’re not selling princesses.”

So what does this mean for you, aspiring artist and designer? Well, “know your audience” should be somewhere in the top three things you should consider before marketing your creation. But somewhere close to the top of that list should be: “find a way to grow your audience because stagnation is for losers.”

[Source: How Not to Suck at Game Design]