The Weekly Update: Chocolate Bunny Edition
91 million chocolate bunnies are sold in the US for Easter, of which almost 54 million will have their ears eaten first.
Courtesy of Insider come a few other Easter trivia winners:
180 million eggs are sold.
1.5 billion (!!!) Peeps – those chick-shaped marshmallows that come in 24 flavours – are consumed every Easter. They blow up really neat in the microwave though. Great fun for kids.
The average person who celebrates Easter spends $151 on the holiday. That’s 700 Lindt Lindor chocolates – red ones of course.
Who doesn’t love chocolate? And who doesn't love finding an undiscovered egg in July? One can only assume it hadn’t gone bad. Unless it is a Crème Egg which was bad in the first place. Although as the most popular kind of Easter Egg, I have probably offended many of you with that last comment. (They’re still gross.)
But those aren’t the most interesting kind of Easter Eggs.
Back in 1980 an Atari programmer was feeling a bit unacknowledged by his employer and embedded a message, "Created by Warren Robinett" that appeared only if a player moved their character over a specific pixel during a certain part of the game whereupon they entered a previously "forbidden" part of the map where the message could be found. Mr. Robinett never told Atari and it was discovered by a gamer a few months after launch and it was dubbed an “Easter Egg”.
Since then, Easter Eggs have become more popular than the original game. For example, in Assassins Creed 3, if you decide to take a break from helping George Washington defeat the Redcoats and hang out at the homestead, you should find a turkey. Go up to it, feed it and punch in the famous Konami Code (that’s “up up down down left right left right B A,” of course). The turkey will don a cloak and hood just like your Assassin! Of course it will.
Gamer culture is a real thing and there are some stereotypes that should be busted:
It’s gender diverse. 42% of console gamers are women.
It’s huge. Global games revenues are estimated to hit $175 billion in 2020.
It’s dominant. Video games make up three of the top five biggest entertainment launches of the past 20 years (pushing movies like Star Wars off the list).
It’s mainstream. There are over 2.6 billion gamers globally, with over 380 million playing games on Facebook every month.
Most importantly, gaming is not an isolated endeavor. Gamers form deep and meaningful social bonds with other players in their communities, even if they never meet them in person. Between 10% and 30% of regular online gamers report having formed romantic relationships IRL.
As you can imagine, gaming has increased during the pandemic as people sought both distraction and social connection. The kinds of games they have chosen to play is even more interesting.
Source: Statista 2021
Looks like we’ve had a lot of anger to deal with.
Expert marketers to the gamer generation are more sophisticated than most. Gaming marketers deal with a diverse market and have excruciatingly detailed tracking on how players interact with their games. As a result, gaming marketers rely far more heavily on data than assumptions about their customer base. For example, up to 70% of those who play real-time competitive games do not consider themselves ‘gamers’. It is important to target their actual behaviour more than their attitudes. As much as we believe in qualitative research, this is an example of how critical it is to work with both data-driven and qualitative-driven information to generate true insight.
On a select few topics however, we refuse to be enlightened by data or by qualitative insights. Crème eggs belong in the bin, along with hot cross buns, jellybeans and fondant sculpture cakes.
P.S. Attuned readers might have expected us to write an April Fool’s update. Alas, Google has cancelled their April Fool’s pranks for the second year in a row and as they are expert gamer generation marketers, we thought it wise to follow suit.
* Our WOWU this week could also be considered a FOWU (Food of the Weekly Update). Stracciatella comes in three forms:
Delicious – a variety of soft Italian cheese from the Apulia region using Italian Buffalo milk.
If you’re in the mood – an egg drop soup with spinach and parmesan
Why bother? – a variety of gelato, consisting of milk-based ice cream filled with fine, irregular shavings of chocolate. Yucky texture and indifferent flavour.
None of these are worth putting in an Easter Egg.