Reading the Messages of Corporate Games: The State Farm “A Charmed Life” Game
I make a practice of checking out free online games. I call it research. You can call it goofing off if you want to. Regardless, when I come across a gem like this one I can’t help but think my “goofing off” is time well spent.
In an effort to attract young women to their company, State Farm launched a Shockwave game called “A Charmed Life.” As their target audience (presumably young women out on their own and faced with learning to manage their own finances and future security), I would hope that I could see in this game things I can relate to. However, each level that I completed made me more shocked and appalled at what State Farm thinks will get my attention.
The game itself is a simple Flash game in which you switch positions for symbols on the board to get three similar shapes in a row to delete them from the board. You can’t lose the game (believe me I tried) and it’s not timed (which I’ll say more about later).
In the first level, you play a young, hip “Sex in the City” chick with a cell phone and party dress. The symbols on the board include: ipods, appointment calendar, martini glasses, little red cars, piggy banks, and red high heel shoes. All the things a career woman in her twenties is most concerned about, right?
In the second level you’re settling down, pregnant, and flummoxed by the assembly instructions for your baby’s crib. The symbols on the board are engagement rings, martini glasses (wait, we’re pregnant!), credit cards (kids=debt apparently), small red cars, and piggy banks.
The third level has us back in our careers after having our children. We’re already wearing bifocals, and our pretty party dress has been exchanged for a manly button-up shirt which we wear while showing off the latest business-merger graph. The board’s symbols are: credit cards, small cars, baby rattles, soccer balls (we’re a soccer mom now!) and a symbol I can’t make out. Is it a passport? A book on fire safety? Oh no, it’s the “Red Portfolio” State Farm is trying to sell us. Apparently we don’t need to plan until the kids are born and we’re back to making serious money. Our piggy bank is gone. Our martinis are gone (as if soccer moms don’t need a drink now and then).
The final level shows us as an older woman apparently napping on the beach or passed out after yoga. There’s a dark masculine shape looming over and the symbols on the board still have the house keys, the soccer balls (apparently the kids are playing soccer in college), engagement rings, appointment calendars, and a gold U (which I think is a university symbol for those soccer-playing college kids) and sunglasses. We also retain the red portfolio now that we’re spending our kid’s inheritance with a mysterious dark stranger on the beach.
So let’s get this straight. The game is meant to symbolize the stages of a woman’s life from swinging single to mother, then to career woman and retired mom of college kids. Remember that a marketing company was paid a significant amount of money to develop this carefully crafted game. They pitched it, collaborated on it, designed it, and went to sleep feeling that they’d created a product that would really sell their client’s product in a fun, informative, hip way.
I’m not attracted to the product. I’m offended by the marketing. I’m insulted by the stereotypical life stages that State Farm, and their marketing firm, is suggesting. But this leads us to an important idea about marketing games. To be cost effective, these games must reach a wide audience. Now being a rhetorician, I’m interested in how specific audiences are targeted. State Farm must assume that there is a game-playing woman market. Are we chick-gamers the typical audience for the game and is the content suited to this techy demographic?
Another point to ponder: why can’t we lose the game? Well it would certainly go against the “you go girl” attitude of the game if we could actually lose. If we just sit, if we don’t hurry through life, shifting those symbols fast, we can still get to that sun-kissed spot on the beach with hunky guy. Apparently the message is that you can’t lose if you plan. Sure, no one who carefully planned their life’s savings was ever surprised to find that at retirement time they had nothing (*cough* Enron *cough*).
Just something to think about as the holidays near. What marketing is targeted at you? What games do you play and are they “teaching” you to be a consumer?
June 8th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
actually, blockdot is not a marketing company. they make games. i know this because i designed this game. and believe me when i say, no one in advertising sleeps well at night.
keep in mind that while there are an awful lot of “chick-gamers” that doesn’t mean that every game targeting women is targeting the gaming-savvy. the game was to be primarily used on the client’s website, and i can bet that most of the female patrons of their site were not the type to keep up-to-date on the latest online games.
an unfortunate truth to marketing is that you can’t appeal to all the people all the time. it’s just not possible, and definitely not profitable. you obviously don’t fit the market for this game, and that’s totally fine. i don’t fit it either. it’s easy to be insulted when people try to sell you something with materials that you not only don’t relate to, but object to on a social level. believe me, i know. but unfortunately, the target market for this product see this sort of life for themselves as appealing. nothing but time can change that.
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
To offer another view on this game…
I’m the marketing representative for my small State Farm Agency here in Louisiana. I have been handed the daunting task of growing my Agency’s business. As the above post itterates, “you can’t appeal to all the people all the time”. With this in mind I still have to go to work everyday and dream up new ways to appeal to the younger market that State Farm so desparately needs in order to continue to grow and prosper in the insurance industry. While I had nothing to do with this particular game I find it a huge step in the right direction from what I have thus far seen at State Farm.
With the “baby-boomers” hitting the “end” of this game, it becomes obvious that there needs to be some “sex-in-the-city” types to refill the spots being vacated. This all adds up to a huge problem for State Farm as a corporation. While there are a number of ways to contact these prospects, it has thus far been the policy of State Farm to not utilize the most effective methods, ie. email, text message, and internet advertising, in a widespread fashion. Ups and downs can be cited on both sides of the fence, however I feel that without innovative thinking, like that which concocted this “game”, State Farm will soon go the way of the dinosaur.
I can see how this particular vision of our potential customer base would offend some, but I think if it gets even one “sex-in-the-city”er thinking about how she will someday be able to afford retirement, or kids in college, then we are doing our job. Who’s to say…
That said, thanks for your post as it helps shed some light on what I personally am trying to do on a day to day basis. I would love to hear more feedback, john.tattan.pxcr@statefarm.com, and hope all is well with you and yours.