The Disconnect Between Brand Loyalty and Sales in the Booming Gaming Peripheral Market

The gaming peripheral market is booming with an estimated $2.7 billion dollars in global sales in 2017. As competition increases and more and more companies are vying for consumers’ attention and money, gaming peripheral manufacturers have to focus on building brand loyalty among their consumers and, more importantly, transforming this loyalty into sales. Using our Gaming Peripheral Brand Tracker, we investigated the brand loyalty of the 21 million core PC gamers (play PC games more than six hours a week) across five key European gaming markets: the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, France, and Poland. Of these gamers, 78% own at least one key gaming peripheral, namely a gaming-specific headset, keyboard, or mouse.

Brand loyalty is high but doesn’t guarantee conversion

Core PC gamers are generally very loyal to the brands they own. The average brand loyalty across the 24 brands studied was at 85%, meaning that consumers answered yes when asked: “Would you buy this brand again?”. Brand loyalty among SteelSeries users is the highest at 92%.

However, while core PC gamers are generally loyal to the brand they own, they don’t necessarily buy the same brand for all their peripherals. Across five key peripheral brands — SteelSeries, Razer, Corsair, Logitech G, and HyperX — only 34% of their owners had two or more peripherals of the same brand. While most of these brand owners would prefer to own the same brand (74% on average across these brands), they are happy to switch if another brand offers better quality.

Looking at key peripheral owners across these brands, we see that Razer owners are most likely to own multiple Razer peripherals. An impressive 46% of Razer key peripheral owners own another Razer peripheral and 15% owns a full set of mouse, keyboard, and headset. HyperX, a relatively new player in the mouse and keyboard business, has the lowest share of set owners, with only 24% owning two or more HyperX peripherals, and 6% owning a full set.

Reviews and Prices Trump Loyalty

Core PC Gamers are driven by quality and choose the best (reviewed) peripheral in their budget range. This is also reflected in the purchase drivers, with 62% of core PC gamers indicating that reviews, whether online consumer reviews, online professional reviews, or reviews in magazines, are important in the purchase decision.

For core PC gamers across Europe, reviews and prices trump affinity for a brand when it comes to purchasing behavior. When asked about their drivers for buying gaming peripherals, 31% and 27% of core PC gamers consider good reviews by consumers on a website and a product being on sale as main drivers, respectively. This is compared to 24% who consider “made by favorite brand” as a main motivator.

This trend shows some differences per country, however. In Poland, a favorite brand is as strong a purchase driver as consumer reviews at 30%. In fact, Polish gamers are the most influenced by the brand. In France, discounts/sales trump consumer reviews at 33% versus 25%.

Overall, brand affinity proves to be a much more salient driver than commercials, endorsements by pro gamers, and magazine reviews.

Original post here.