Marketing the sub sets

I recently posted a question on Wizkids Facebook page about buying a set with figures you never heard of. Would you? There weren't as many answers as I might have hoped for, but the ones I got were fairly diverse with good reasoning. I think they may be a good representation of the buying community for the most part.

Most said that they needed to know the characters and have an interest in them. One said he would probably buy and I do know of a few die hard collectors who will take anything Heroclix. Another commenter mentioned that the mechanics would have to be very good to get him to buy characters he had never heard of before. He would even research the character if he liked it enough. I found that interesting too.

When Invincible came out, I have to admit, I never heard of the characters in it before. What can I say? I just hadn't. I still bought the set. A commenter suggested that the sets at the time and Indy was a matter of experiment. That may be. I think the greatest failing of Indy was having awesome figures that you could only get in the UK or US. An interesting marketing ploy meant to work by geographic marketing sector, but a failed one. People were upset about having to go out of their way to get missing pieces for the set. Along with that, there may not have been too much in extra cost to do separate packaging for all that, but it had to be time consuming. Time creates cost.

Now there's some new subsets coming out and I wonder if there's any experiment intended with these or if some marketing research was done? Let's take a look at two sets upcoming.

STREETFIGHTER: I think this set is going to sell hot. There's been a long time cult following of this game. It's very well known and bridges genres from video game to table top. Not a bad idea at all. Cool characters with cool abilities. I'll be interested to see the translation. Could this mean other video game related clix in the future? Maybe, but licensing could be a nightmare. Streetfighter has all it's characters in one place. Halo saw some popularity, but I never bought it. Here's something to chew on, I think Streetfighter's sales could be hotter than Halo. What do you think?

MEGADETH: This one is tricky. Megadeth is popular, I like them, but music tastes are more fickle than gaming tastes could ever hope to be. I could see this as an experiment to see if music tastes could bring more players in for heroclix. It's a small set, so sort of safe as a test launch subject. There are plenty of metal collectors and there have been plenty of genre cross overs in the past with music to comics. Just look at KISS. Timing could also be crucial in getting a good sell out of a music based set. Megadeth's next major US tour is in July with them in Europe for March and April. It could be good for cross marketing of the tour and I could see that as a marketing tactic. I also wonder, is Dave Mustaine a clix fan? And does this mean we could see a KISS box set sometime? Rock and Roll clix? Hey, in the video game genre's Rock Star saw a nice long sell. Maybe, but I'm not counting on it and probably wouldn't buy it myself.