So you're opening a game store. But what kind of game store will you be? New? Retro? What services will you offer? Repairs? Tournaments? Who is your target audience? Niche gamers? College Students?..................Your Mom?






Now that I had decided to open our game store it was time to focus in on what kind of store we wanted to be. Building a brand for your store is fun and scary at the same time. You can put in a lot of time and effort into trying to be something, but if the experience your customers are having isn't what you intended it can completely alter your plans. I had a very clear cut goal in my mind when opening up, now I had to try and put that goal into practice and hope that I could convey it to my customers. The experience I wanted people to have was this: this store is a friendly, positive, safe and trustworthy environment in which everyone is welcome.

When deciding who my target audience was, and after looking at our extremely minuscule advertising budget, I decided to go for as broad of an appeal as possible. Gamers are my people. I find it easy to talk with them and get my message across effectively. However, the broader population can be a bit trickier for me to communicate with. In order to survive, I obviously needed some kind of steady consumer base, so I decided to start strong with what I know and expand my reach as quickly as I could in order to not label myself strictly a "nerd dungeon." This meant that I would start by focusing on gamers and build off of that start.

Prior to opening the store, I had to try and get the message out that we would be opening our store and also show people what we planned to do with it. For many years before operating the store, I shunned Facebook, thinking of it as a ridiculous time waster. As a store owner with just over a year behind him, I've fully embraced this form of social media and recognize how integral it's been to my business's success and how it has helped me in conveying my message to people. Through a combination of Kijiji ads and building a Facebook presence, I was able to show a couple hundred potential, local customers what I was all about before we were able to open our doors to the public. I would post pictures of the new building I was moving into along with the renovations and pics of us moving items into the store. I also posted pictures of the new stock that arrived every few days to show them what would be available for them on opening day. I was attempting to build up some anticipation for this store. Keep in mind that there hasn't been a non-EB Games style gaming store in my city for about a decade, so I was hopeful that there would be some genuine excitement growing for this type of business. It was hard for me to gauge how much of this new following was actually interested in coming down to spend time and money in my store and how many were just casually observing. The plan was to get as many gamers down as possible in the first month and try to make their experience so good that they would bring others down and spread the word about my store.


Fast forward to opening day and a nervous Crabmaster, along with my wife, brother, and a close friend in the store tiding up and organizing trying to make the store as presentable as possible for the 10-20 customers we figured we would get for the entire day. The plan was to take the time to engage with each person and make their experience memorable enough so that they would come again later in the same week with a friend that they had told. It was quite shocking when we went to open up the store and saw a line up of eager customers long enough to wrap around the corner of the block outside! We didn't even notice them building up outside the store as we were preparing for the day. My plan of taking the time to engage with each customer was quickly thrown out the window and turned into pointing them to the game selection for their console of choice and get them through the till as quickly as possible. My less than 700 sq ft space was immediately packed with 40 or more people at a time, which quickly became hot, smelly, uncomfortable, and delightful. Luckily for me, what I lacked in time to spend with each customer I seemed to make up for in selection as most people that left looked satisfied with what they took with them.

My initial message was distorted from what I has hoping would be "check out this new store, the owner knows my name and helped me find some cool games that I really enjoy" to "The place was f@^$'n crazy. You HAVE to check it out!!!". Different than what I had planned, but fortunately, it had the same effect. People were talking about us and bringing friends and family down to see what we had to offer. As the initial frenzy died down a bit during our second week, I was able to spend more time with each visitor to my store and find out a little about them and build a rapport.

With new relationships being built with my customers, I was slowly working towards that "friendly" label I was hoping to associate with the store. Now we started planning and hosting events in the store. This had a few benefits including: promoting the store, having a bit of fun, growing a niche community, and giving me the chance to work on the safe and inclusive image I wanted. We tried to keep the events varied and did events for Tetris, Halo 2, Goldeneye, Smash Brothers Melee and Brawl in the first few months. It had the desired effect of bringing new people to each event, and since they all went off without any issues, we started to gain some momentum with our branding.

Its easy to be cynical about a lot in life, but I'm not a fan of that outlook, so I strive to keep the store in a positive light. A prime example that we could take advantage of is the poor reputation one of our biggest rivals, EB Games, has. Years of low trade-in values and uninformed employees has soured many peoples' experience with them and they are not shy about sharing that with me. I refuse to engage in promoting the negative stereotype and instead offer up why we like them. Being on good terms with a well-established franchise like that, and a couple others, has sent me a ridiculous amount of referral customers. If they caught wind of me or my employees speaking ill of their policies or practices, I doubt they would be so friendly. I approached and planned a launch day event for Mario Kart 8 at the EB Games store in our mall to showcase our solidarity and let people know we can work together.

I also like to poke fun at some of our misfortunes. For example, we had a few after hours break in attempts, one of which was successful. The post I made on Facebook letting people know about one of the break-ins didn't asking for someone's head or lament the dangers of the downtown core or our city, but instead poked a bit of fun at the ravenous N64 fanbase we have that couldn't wait until we were open and had to beat the rush. I also had a friend of mine construct this awesome open/close sign


Lastly we had to work on trustworthiness. This comes with time and is easily tarnished with one or two ill placed mess ups. I felt the best way to gain this sort of reputation was by offering fair prices when buying games compared to other local offerings, and to guarantee ALL products in the store. There is nothing worse than spending your money on an item only to find out that it doesn't work when you get home. We've made a point of refunding or returning any item that a customer is unsatisfied with their purchase, and we take this very seriously. In the case of some customers that do a lot of business with us, we extend that quite a bit as well. We've replaced Xbox systems up to 8 months for certain customers in order to make sure they keep coming back to us and are confident to buy a used product from my store.

I've worked a lot of retail and and awful as it can be to deal with an upset customer, it is your prime chance to get them hooked on your business. If you can help someone who has come into your store with a problem that made them disappointed or even angry and get them to leave happy, there is a very good chance they are going to speak highly of your store and service to their friends and family instead of easily spreading trash talk. I make a strong point of owning up to my mistakes in order to keep my customers happy. If I priced a game incorrectly at lower than I meant to, I eat the loss. If I miss something during the testing process and a customer comes back because a controller or console is not working as it should, I replace the item and typically offer a discount or freebie for the inconvenience of having to come back to the store to fix the error.

Small gestures from a business can make a big impact on a person.

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