Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Good Plan, Lousy Communication

AEG, publisher of Smash-up, Trains, Epic PvP and several varieties of Love Letter, announced their Pro Retailer program last March at the GAMA Trade Show. It was a pretty nice promotion, offering incentives and promotional items to retailers who agreed to purchase or pre-commit to orders of specific quantities of monthly upcoming items, such as Greedy Greedy Goblins or Archer. Like I said, great idea, one that we bought into for several of the promotions.

Unfortunately, the communication wound up lacking as AEG did not make clear how the ordering of their games was to be handled. Case in point, last June's release of Archer:  Once You Go Blackmail... The promotion was, buy 12 copies of the game and get additional promotional games and items. It sounded great and we agreed to participate. Unfortunately, the folks at AEG never discussed how the order was to be handled. I figured that either AEG would sell them to us direct and would send an invoice or would contact our distributor about the order. Instead, it turned out that the store had to take the initiative in the process and contact the distributor to put in the order. Due to this lack of clarity of communication,  we wound up not participating in 3 of AEG's Pro-Retailer promotions so far this year. Now that AEG has clarified the process, we will participate in future opportunities but 'tis a pity to have lost the previous chances due to poor communication

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