GameCo Marketing Strategy

Taking on this project at GameCo, as someone who enjoys casual gaming, was a fascinating experience. The primary objective was to assess whether GameCo's marketing budget strategy required an update in light of emerging data trends post-2016.

My approach involved a detailed examination of sales data across various regions and an analysis of game rankings over time. I accomplished this by conducting descriptive analysis, expertly transforming the data with PivotTables, and presenting the findings through visualizations in Excel.

Despite its simplicity, this project offered valuable insights. It took about 12-18 hours to complete, delivering concise yet meaningful information to help GameCo make decisions regarding their marketing budget.

Total Units Sold by Region & Year

The Steps I Took:

  1. Cleaned the data, including removing blanks, repeats, and incomplete rows

  2. Measured central tendencies and dropped outliers outside the 95% range

  3. Grouped and summarized the data with Pivot Tables

  4. Visualized the data inside of Excel

  5. Presented findings using PowerPoint

Tools I Used:

  • Excel

  • PowerPoint

Why I took these step:

  1. Allowed for accurate analysis

  2. Made sure no outliers skewed the data set

  3. Allowed me to get a higher look at the data grain

  4. Ensured insights were easy and quick to understand

  5. Used to report finding to stakeholders to make decisions with

Shows an overall lack of sales

Here are some of my wonderful visuals from this project.

Highlights a decrease in game releases
Demonstrates a consolidation of genres for 2016

Full Gallery

  • Click to Enlarge

Results:

Contrary to GameCo’s expectations, the market has changed both internally and externally.

Internally, as seen by table two, the EU market has grown from less than 10% to nearly 40% of total units sold for GameCo

Externally Table 1 and Table 3 show a lack of physical games being both bought and released in the regions.

In light of these changes, GameCo needs to:

  • Either update its marketing strategy or allocate a larger marketing budget to the EU region

  • Explore other regions for potential market opportunities that may not have existed previously

  • Consider alternate growth opportunities for the company outside of manufacturing

Data Sources:

  1. GameCo Data Set Download

Retrospective:

Excel gets overlooked a lot among all the shiny fun software’s like Python or SQL but it shines for quick fixes, succinct filtering, and simple visuals. And it's comparatively easy to use.

So while I wasn’t thrilled about this project, the data wrangling and transformation I did demonstrates my solid excel skills. Plus, as a non-gamer, gamer, it was interesting to look at the sales trends of the three main markets.

While I don’t plan on continuing this project further, I do think that it is vital to keep up on Excel as it really is the bread and butter of the data analytics world. When the other software’s get to fancy, you go back to Excel.