Among the specific expressions of my sympathy toward Pepsi is that DSG only carries Aquafina bottled water. Never Dasani and not the house brands unless Aquafina is unavailable. Not only is Aquafina good, but it's bottled a bit more ruggedly than most other offerings, and thus provides something of a "higher-end" experience. But more importantly, I like supporting (with dollars) a brand with a business that includes such an admirable bit of history.
Dr. Richard Gunderman wrote a great article in Psychology Today about how Coke and Pepsi fought for business over largely racial lines in the 1940s and 1950s. Naturally, the Atlantic turned the story into clickbait, but it's no worse a story for being thus utilized. I highly recommend reading Dr. Gunderman's article in its entirety, but the summary is this:
Coca-Cola was based in Atlanta and had little interest during that era in catering to black-owned businesses or customers, mainly because its decision-makers were typical southern racists. The company had even endorsed a segregationist's re-election as governor of Georgia. This is before the Civil Rights Act, at a time when restaurants and hotels would openly Wuher black customers out the door with a "We don't serve your kind here" or worse.
Meanwhile over at Pepsi, executives saw the statistical growth in what was then called "the Negro market" and observed Coke flipping those potential customers the bird, over and over again. The light bulb went on, Pepsi remembered that it liked money, and the company put together a "special markets division" and tasked them to develop a marketing campaign that has to be seen as one of the all-time against-the-odds successes in all of advertising history.
Pepsi tied high-profile black endorsers to positive family-and-community imaging in its marketing to black communities. While other companies utilized negative stereotypes about blacks, Pepsi went the other way. We should caveat that Pepsi was no bastion of noble purity throughout this; plenty of Pepsi's own employees were as racist as the next guy during that time period, and gave the "special markets division" short shrift and little respect within the company even as it was succeeding in its mission. Pepsi also took care not to push too hard on the special-markets campaign within earshot of "conventional" markets, in fear of upsetting white audiences. It's dismaying that they hedged their bet in this manner, but supposably that was the reality of the time.
Well, we all know how the story turned out. The good guys won. Black communities saw that Pepsi was catering to them, and they reciprocated that with business at the register. Pepsi's sales increased dramatically and they rose from an economy brand to the solid second-place market position ever after. And the efforts of Pepsi's "special markets division" became a case study for a business finding and embracing a niche audience and turning it into something much more.
(As we entered the modern era and both companies became megacorporations, they ultimately shed any reluctance to exploit any market they could possibly find and identify. Coca-Cola in particular courted the urban minority youth market hard with a basketball-focused brand makeover for Sprite that ran for years. But history hasn't forgotten their Old Shame.)
So, this is the point in the blog article where I want to be careful not to hit the ham-handed cliches. Surely it has been discussed ad nauseam how awful the hobby game industry is when it comes to dealing with anyone who isn't a cis straight white male. Yes, there has been progress. Yes, there is a general progressive attitude in the more professional networking circles. And yes, stores like mine who are in it for the long haul found ways to roll out the welcome mat to... non-males, non-cis, non-white, non-straight, etc, gamers. But we're not fully there yet, as an industry. And any time some LGS disregards those audiences or aligns with those who impede that audience's ability to enjoy games, that's an open opportunity for every competing store that likes money and isn't aligned with bigots or bullies.
But I'm not writing this article to virtue-signal and I'm not writing this to earn a pat on the head. I want to challenge myself, and the rest of us, to find out who we aren't bringing in, but would otherwise be reaching, and whom our competition is disregarding. And I mean more than just competition in the form of other hobby game stores. Online is our competition, the mass market is our competition, other forms of entertainment are our competition.
A few that come to mind, that I think are food for further thought:
- Visually impaired and hearing-impaired gamers. I don't think any of us would not want to welcome them, but wishing does not make it so. We have a blind D&D player and I was initially at a loss as to how to facilitate his gameplay. Fortunately, my store manager had some military training on that and he knew right away how to provide movement guidance, environmental guidance, verbal and otherwise auditory cues, and so on, so that the player could get into the game and fully participate. I don't even know what I am going to do if a deaf player joins a booster draft, for example. I imagine writing would work, but would be slow and cumbersome. Nobody in the company knows sign language. At DSG's scale, it's not a matter of "if," but of "when."
- Younger gamers, especially those barely of age to learn how to socialize in a tabletop or role-playing format. Most conventional FLGSes are utterly unprepared for the particulars of this audience. The trailblazer in this regard is surely Rob Gruber of Good Times Games on the west coast of Canada, whose paid-admission all-ages immersive roleplay experiences have been polished to a shine and have his business punching well above its weight class. Follow the Good Times Games feed on social media if you want to learn about an orthogonal approach to the hobby game world that just might be the most unscratched surface left in most markets (including my own).
- There are gamers I've mentioned here before who are avidly and assiduously determined to consume only G-rated or PG-rated entertainment, such as the LDS (Mormon) missionaries who already frequent DSG during their free-time days. I suspect that this potential audience is both deeper and more multifaceted than any of us realize. I'm not even sure what this audience is called, and I don't think it's limited to Christian or similar communities either. And I would imagine this demographic probably has reasonable disposable income... that they already aren't spending on a lot of pop culture entertainment offerings. There was a business called CleanFlicks that used to edit DVDs and VHS movies to reach this audience, and they were doing well until the movie studies sued them for creating derivative works. They re-opened purely as a curation service and thrived for six more years after that until streaming killed the video rental biz. I don't think an FLGS would want to actually edit the games we sell, but curation and filtering might have some serious value here. In fact, the more I write about this, the more I want to try it. I doubt Magic: the Gathering would make the "clean" title lineup, so we would start with unambiguously family-friendly fare like Ticket to Ride and build from there. I am also not religious, so I would have some homework ahead of me to understand the audience and tailor the offering.
- Spanish-speaking gamers, or potential gamers, and you can substitute in a linguistic minority that is more pertinent to your locale if you have one. Almost two million people out of the five million living in metro Phoenix speak Español, and just by the law of large numbers that suggests hundreds of thousands at least who speak Spanish primarily, and may speak little or no English at all. Major games like Magic: the Gathering and HeroClix are available in Spanish, and Asmodee and other board game publishers include multilingual instructions with most or all titles. Most modern video games play in every language based on console settings. How many of those people would shop at Juegos de Arizona if I had a bilingual staff and opened a location in the heart of demographically Latinx parts of town?
That seems like a very short list, and I'm sure there are obvious ones I am missing. Who else could we be reaching? Who might be on the outs of the bar-and-club social scene, and not even know the tabletop hobby is a thing? Who might be ill-situated to live and breathe social media and e-commerce, but still enjoy strategic challenges? Not all of our stores will be in a position to capture all of these "fugitive resource" audiences, but at the scale of small business, just doing an excellent job developing one such niche market might be enough to spell economic success and a substantial first-to-market incumbency advantage.
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