Designing the Launch of India’s First Gaming Handheld Device

Monotony always kicks in. Novelty ‌picks you up! What do you all do to keep your creative juices flowing? We look for opportunities that push us to think out-of-the-box despite their challenges. We mostly seek those that give us the adrenaline rush and sometimes it is a happenstance. It happened one day with me too, with Flipkart’s launch of the Asus ROG Ally, the first ever gaming handheld device.

The Asus ROG Ally is in the news!

Working in the Electronics and Large Appliances category for one of the popular eCommerce platforms of India — Flipkart had made me quite familiar with the audience. However, this one was a new task, which caught my attention. The Asus ROG Ally, the first ever gaming handheld device, was about to be launched on Flipkart and only on Flipkart for the very first time. This was BIG news, and we had a few days in hand to make this news viral.

With spiralling thoughts and a million questions, we had a bunch of ideas for the Asus ROG Ally Launch Plan and needed an engagement plan for the gamers. We wanted them to not just stop by, but shop for their gaming love. And so, we started!

The Game-plan of the Big Launch

We gathered a bunch of gamers and asked them questions about what sorts of games they play, what features they like in those games, and what makes them want to play those games addictively. We understood their fascination for the utopian world and its fantasy creatures along with the imagination it creates for them. From that, we made a list of themes for our games: Action, Adventure, Sports, Racing, Strategy, Horror, and more.

In half a day, we had to pitch an idea of an engagement construct. We came up with a 4-line Zombie story in four hours. We also worked on another 4-liner, hoping another option might just help us in cracking the launch idea. ^_^ This one was on Cyberpunk *Wink* *Wink*

It was a lot of fun thinking out-of-the-box, away from the regular copies and it pushed us all to do more and better within the strict timeline constraints.

It is easy to feel lost in the timed-delivery chaos, while still having to showcase peak creativity. This article may help in learning that it is similar across platforms, with just unique twists and turns being tackled in various ways.

Our First Zombie — The Inside Story

We pitched the first Zombie story in all its grandeur and it resulted in a room full of cheer. Next day, we found out that the brand needs to know our thoughts on the final artefacts working with the capabilities that we have.

The fundamental requirement from the brand was to highlight the specifications of the product and what better than centering an engagement construct around those!?

Our Engagement Construct

That’s when we used Adobe Firefly to make our engagement construct. It was a survey with multiple-choice questions based on the features of the product. Our designers rendered a game-like look to the storyline with AI-generated images.

Our construct had the following pivots:

• Story formation for our gamer audience
• Multiple-choice questions around the product specifications
• AI-generated images where the clues for the answers to the questions were hidden as scenes

Our 4 liner story

The survey construct began with a 4–5 liner story, Zombies Apocalypse -

The world has ended, and the zombies have taken over the planet. Two of you humans have somehow survived. The city is in pieces and houses destroyed. Cars are crashing, and roads are broken. You are hiding behind a wrecked bike with your neighbour as you have escaped the prying eyes of the zombies. You overlook the patch that was a construction site in the past. Find the game specifications in this scene based on the below questions. Aaaaaaaannnndddd…RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! A zombie has just spotted you…

What happened next?

This was followed by images describing the story and then the multiple-choice questions. We worked on it to make it more like a hunt. Within each image, were 5 images for 5 multiple-choice questions, where we hid the clues. Who wouldn’t want to stop by for a Zombie story filled with images of a Zombie-land? 🧟

The construct gained a lot of traction and we overachieved our targets. The Engagement Construct, Category Landing Page takeover (information about this latest, upcoming launch was all over the place in the Electronics category page, since the product falls under that category) plus the GIFs — all together worked well for the Launch events. We crossed the expected numbers with many people engaging with the survey and coming back to retake the quiz, with more time spent on each question.

Game on!

The brand — Asus was quite happy with the results and the business team came with more requests for new product launches like Lenovo LOQ, Realme Pad 2, Samsung Galaxy S9 and Lenovo P12.

As excited as we are with the big news of landing more such interesting projects, we are meticulously working towards finding techniques that can help in building engagement constructs in varied ways, across categories.

Do you have such fun stories about how you worked on something, which was like a mere 4-line story that was executed in various ways and had record-breaking results? Can you share in the Comments section?