Right now, Jamie is playing a PlayStation game called Black. Judging by the cover — and honey, when it comes to video games, you can ALWAYS judge by the cover — I’m going to assume it has to do with shooting stuff.

Black is rated M-17, which means it’s only for adults. Since it involves shooting stuff, we can also assume males would be the primary players of this game. Therefore, on paper anyway, Black’s rough target demographic is adult men who own video game consoles. My husband is an adult. He is a man. He owns a video game console. Cool, huh?

(To be fair, their target demographic is a lot more detailed than that and Jamie is probably about ten years older than Black’s perfect customer, but three out of four ain’t bad. )

Black, like many combat style video games, is arranged by mission. A mission is similar to a level. When you get to the end of the mission — as in, you got through it and didn’t die — you save. Then you can either continue playing or quit until next time.

Unlike many video games, though, in Black, you can ONLY save when you’re done your mission. Not a moment before. And the missions are an hour and a half long.

My husband, like most adult males, has a life. He has a spouse. He has a toddler. He has two cats. He runs a small business. He does not often have an hour and a half of uninterrupted time, and when he does, he doesn’t always want to spend the entire time playing video games.

So when he has only half an hour and wants to play Black, he finds something else to do.

If I were the nice people who created Black, I wouldn’t be happy with this information.

I know, like I said earlier, he’s not the target. He’s a Daddy Type and they’re not trying for Daddy Types. But what about the people they were trying for? High school and college students are busy, too. Drinking and going out on the pull take time, people.

If you haven’t read Identifying Your Target Market or Why I Don’t Want A Monster In My Pants and Target Demographics, The Sequel, you probably should.

What we learned in the target demographics articles was that you should laser target your marketing to the exact person you want to buy your shit.

But, and there’s always a but, that’s your marketing. It’s not your product development. And if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, marketing begins in product development.

(Aside: Actually, it was Seth Godin, author of a new post about ignoring the n00bs, who said this. While we’re on the topic of Mr. Godin, I have it on good authority that he or one of his minions has a Google alert for his name. Hi Seth! Would you please provide a blurb for my book jacket? I didn’t want to ask by email because that’s not exactly a Purple Cow thing to do, now, is it?)

Your TV campaigns and your magazine ads and your signs in bus shelters are not your entire marketing campaign. In an industry like video games, a large part of your marketing campaign is word of mouth. And Black has screwed this one up royally.

When considering elements to include in your product or service, think of your target first. That part’s easy. Then think of everybody else. Not so easy.

If you’re thinking of adding a feature that would not negatively impact your target demographic but would POSITIVELY impact your secondary and tertiary demographics, add it.

Secondary and tertiary demographics can tell two friends, too, you know.

In this example, adding the option to save mid-mission would not impact the experience of the target user even a teensy bit. It would have zero impact on their game. On the other hand, it would make game play a whole lot better for people like my husband.

Then he would tell all his friends that Black is awesome and at least ten of them would buy it.

This is not rocket science, people.