I love the Sims, and its certainly had an impact on marketing & advertising. The most notable example of this being how IKEA created an upgrade pack for Sims 2 which enabled you to create a wonderful house full of IKEA products. This spring Renault will continue this movement by creating an electric car upgrade pack for Sims 3. It sounds like its going to be really exciting so I will look forward to giving it a trial.
Digigen Strategy for Sims:
1) Alpha Test new products. Test the new products which aren’t yet common to the market to see if it is a good enough product to start putting into real-life Beta. Sims has an audience of 4.5million (based on copies sold).
2) Involve the community in development. Get the community to feedback on what products you think should be in there. To me, a Best Buy or a Wal*Mart would be a really interesting addition to the Sims community.
3) Get them to create products for you away from the game. Create a Sims development pack where consumers can use CAD type software to design new products for the game and thus potentially your brand too.
