I used to work in multinational communication agencies. Later, I worked in senior leadership positions focused on market expansion, and revenue growth. One of the first things I used to do when I started building marketing campaigns was look at my client’s addressable market.
I’d ask myself: What does my client’s target audience want? What are the audience characteristics? From that baseline data, I’d build a performance dashboard for my clients and employers. Indeed, any serious business needs to spend the majority of its time and resources analyzing their audience as this work is critical to business survival.
That’s why, today, I’m going to do a very quick audience analysis for board game publishers.
The U.S., the white, non-Hispanic population is 57.8% of the total U.S. population. The number of mixed race people living in the U.S. in 2020 has increased by 276% over the 2010 census. The majority of the U.S. population (52.7%) under the age of 18 is BIPOC.
The U.S. is one of the single largest consumer markets in the world. Despite the relatively small population base, 329.5 million people, household spending in the U.S. is one of the highest in the world, and represents a quarter of the globe’s household consumption. When you compare the U.S. population with the population of India which represents 1.38 billion people, you might understand why most consumer goods manufacturers care so much about the U.S. consumer market.
Taking off my corporate dashboard hat and donning my current hat as a board game researcher, these basic demographic audience analyses are the exact point where my cognitive dissonance starts growing.
In the U.S., white straight men in the make up only roughly ~25% of the population, and ~10% of the global population. On the other hand, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour represent over 80% of the world’s population, and are rightly called the People of the Global Majority (PGM).
Yet, a recent analysis of board game cover art of 200 of the top BoardGameGeek games found only 17.5% of the human representation on covers was that BIPOC identities (112 total figures), versus 82.5% white-presenting figures (528 total figures). From a marketing perspective, I find that really strange.
Why? Because covers are all about marketing, they are an invitation to buy, and to play. Yet, the skew here isn’t reflective of addressable audiences in one of the largest consumer markets in the world, nor does it represent a wider global addressable market. To a grizzled, veteran marketer and data analyst like me, the overrepresentation of whiteness in board game marketing seems like abject business malpractice.
Then, let’s consider the gender representation on board game covers of the top-ranked 200 BoardGameGeek games. Cover art images of women and/or girls were represented at 23.2% or 195 figures in total. Men and/or boys represented 76.8% of the sample or 647 figures. This is also strange when you consider that the U.S. and Canada have slightly more women than men at 50.5% and 50.4% respectively. Doing even basic audience mapping, an overrepresentation of whiteness and maleness seems a very strange marketing tactic indeed.
Why strange? Again, because marketers and adverstisers know that representation can play a key role in consumer behaviour by enticing demographic identities to purchase or use the products based on their ability to see themselves in the marketing. But, the addressable audience of white males is only ~25%, and yet this demographic identity occupies 80% of the board game cover art.
My PhD research study of the top 400 BoardGameGeek games found that that 92.6% of the labour of game design was that of white-identified, male-identified creators. Again, that’s in stark contrast to the global and U.S. census numbers. This finding was one heck of a labour data skew.
Whenever a representative sample doesn’t map AT ALL to population, you can bet that very strong forces are working against that representative sample, preventing it from looking like the wider population. That kind of finding doesn’t happen naturally. This usually means something systemic, an external force like enforced segegation, active gatekeeping, economic restrictions or policies are acting on that sample, creating that skew, and keeping members of the wider population away.
Based upon my research, I think it is safe to say that decisions made about board game artwork, labour, and design are clearly not undergirded by basic audience nor addressable market data. Clearly, they don’t reflect demographic realities AT ALL.
These decisions are happening for other reasons. One working theory is that people involved in decision-making and leadership of the board games industry, mostly white and male, can only imagine one audience: themselves.
Another reason might be that board game publishers want to keep their market small, stunted, and targeted at only rarified few luxury consumers, in much the same way that luxury fashion lines cater to a tiny handful of oligarchs, and wealthy elites. Perhaps.
But this approach is a very risky strategy long-term as fashions change, and well-heeled, wealthy and elite consumers demonstrate notoriously fickle consumer good purchasing patterns.
So, as a long-time marketer with multinational experience, I now pose a question to board game publishers: Would you, should you stake an entire business, marketing model, or the future of your sector on this audience of solely white males who represent ~25% of the population in the U.S., and ~10% of the global population? Is that a sustainable, long-term strategy?
…Nope, I didn’t think so either.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Board Games
I used to work in multinational communication agencies. Later, I worked in senior leadership positions focused on market expansion, and…
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