Three Ring Ranch 4 P’s

• Place: Online business, which saves on inventory, rent, etc.
• Products: Video tutorials that are aimed at beginning game developers.
• Pricing: Competitive with similar offerings; price testing often.
• Promotion: Focused on social media. Single worst P of the bunch.

Of the 4 P’s for Three Ring Ranch (TRR), the place is the easiest one to talk about because TRR is a digital-only company that exists online — there’s no physical storefront. However, there’s still the idea of “curb appeal” when people open the site in their browser, so looking good and making it easy to find the products is just as important online as in the real world. The TRR site is built on top of WordPress so it’s designed with ease-of-use in mind. There’s a link to the game development courses (the product) right on the home page.

The main products of TRR are online courses that teach game development. The video tutorials are self-paced so the customer can go as slow or fast as they like. Besides the videos, source code for the sample projects is included. Online courses are available for the Corona SDK and Unity tools.

Pricing for TRR products is based on current pricing of the competition plus the amount of material in each course. Due to the number of free courses available online (even though typically of lower quality) TRR is often price-testing the courses to try and find the “sweet spot” for each one — make the most sales, but don’t leave money on the table.

Finally, promotion for the TRR products is mostly an after-thought since the company is run by just one person and time is fleeting. Most promotional activities are tied to social media — answering questions on game development forums and Twitter, then including a link to the game development courses. If there’s one area TRR should improve on, it’s in promoting the current courses.