Problem Background:

Despite its growth and success, the Madden NFL video game faces a marketing challenge in that its growth is restricted to those who are very avid fans of American football and have a high degree of knowledge of the rules of football. It’s estimated there are ~170M NFL fans in the US alone, of which, 100 million are both football fans and play video games. Madden acquires only a fraction of these fans who are both avid NFL fans as well as avid video game players. It is believed there are a total of ~30 million of this group of avid fan video gamers, who can be referred to as “avid NFL fan gamers”. For the Madden NFL business to grow, EA SPORTS must unlock a way for the non-avid NFL fan gamers to enjoy an NFL video game experience as much as the avid NFL fan gamers, but what is the smartest way for EA to approach this? Therefore, the task that EA executives challenged us with was to find ways to grow the game by attracting scores of additional football fans, who self-identify as football fans, but do not currently engage with the Madden NFL video game. 

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Solution:

Following the analysis of data which was provided by EA, a deeper dive into the Voice of Customer was conducted to identify what's missing and what is being executed correctly in the Madden series. With the rise of social media and games like Fortnite taking advantage of their sharing features, one of the suggestions was to implement a weekly or monthly viral competition that would add your custom touchdowns celebrations into the game through Madden's social media accounts to attract new gamers. Many professional sports teams share video game clips on their accounts of ridiculous plays in the games, so by adding a competition feature it would help breakdown the barrier of exclusively football fan or video game fan. The second suggestion was to incorporate more of a backyard football style minigame. Older games are making a comeback with remastered editions, and one of their older IPs was incredibly popular due to its backyard football style, over-the-top plays, and simplified mechanics. Financial reports were also included to show EA their projected earnings after applying these features. 

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Months later following the presentation, the backyard style minigame was showcased as a new feature in their new game called The Yard, Madden 21. EA appeared to like the idea and implemented it nearly exactly as described in the presentation, so the project was a success.