Saturday, April 7, 2012

Seriously, GamePro is Terrible

Can you manufacture nostalgia?

Look at this place. Dirty little shack, isn't it? But it was our dirty little shack, a north shore hot dog legend for like 25 years. I always ordered the same thing: One jumbo dog, order of fries, coke. And those fries were and are the best fries in the entire world.

When they closed, a part of me died. A small part, but it's dead and gone. You could buy the shack, build a new restaurant, sell the same Vienna beef, but it wouldn't be the same and it wouldn't fill the void.

Can you imbue a new business with that? ...How?

Or, let's say you're running that shack and you want to expand, to open a second shack. You open it in another town, well outside your sphere of influence. No one knows about the original shack. Do you boast about your decades of hot doggery when nobody knows who the hell you are?

Marketing is tricky. Harnessing word of mouth is like herding ghosts.

PROTIP: GamePro is a terrible magazine. EGM is much better. The prevalence of GamePro at every newsstand in America signals a distasteful public or a malicious god or both.
I love infarction with a little soy sauce. Cowboy bones aren't bad, either, but you get funny looks when you order them in small towns.

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