Marketers often live by 3 rules:  Innovation, Differentiation, and Newness. But what happens when changing your product upsets the customer base? Remember New Coke? Twitter’s rebranding to X? Netflix password sharing?  How about Star Wars or Marvel Universe? All the same rules and caveats apply when it comes to apps and games.

In this talk, we’ll talk about the balance - between driving positive change and keeping your user base happy. As a developer, there is a never-ending balancing act between keeping loyal legacy users happy while simultaneously delivering a product experience that excites and engages new users.

When you have a profitable, growing app or game, it makes sense to invest in ongoing improvements with updates, new features, improved mechanics, special events, and reward programs, all with the goal of keeping it fresh and fun for current users, while also making it attractive for new customers.  And yet, every day, we see where updates backfire and a once fan favorite experiences a major drop in user retention. What happened? In all likelihood, you pissed off your audience.

In this talk, we’ll break down the delicate balance between driving growth and managing change across a diverse customer base, along with sharing real-world examples to learn from.

• How to address legacy user needs/wants versus new users: You can’t assume that older and younger customers are the same. In actuality, they’re completely different. For instance in games, older audiences play for the challenge and love the nostalgia of classic games. They’re more unlikely to accept changes made to a game they play day in and day out. Younger audiences, while they also play for the challenge, love being a part of a game community and the social aspects of gameplay.
• Extensive UI or Features Redesign: Making changes can be tricky. A refresh is ok. However, if your core user base is older, a major rehaul is likely to turn them off because they like what they like and have developed specific expectations.
• Overpromising and Underdelivering: Setting clear expectations on future updates and improvements is crucial. Typically, when users experience anything that isn’t exactly what they were expecting, they will let you know about it - loudly, or worse, abandon an app or game altogether.
• Lack of Transparency: Active customer communities want to be looped in on everything from major updates and upcoming changes to known bugs with a fix on the way and more. They don’t react well to surprises.
• Lack of Community: Especially important for younger audiences, creating a forum that brings together users with a shared interest to talk and share ideas is a must.
• Non-User Friendly Monetization: Overpriced models leave customers feeling that their access to new content, features, and rewards is limited. If making major monetization changes, careful management is necessary to ensure legacy users don’t feel they’re losing as a result.
• Revamping a Game’s Economy: A game’s economy is the make-or-break driver of player engagement, and making changes can reshape the entire gameplay experience which could turn off users. Including existing players in the refresh process via beta testing and enabling other ways to provide feedback is key to securing their buy-in. Players want to be heard.
• Driving User Acquisition: Marketing to a whole new audience might require new messaging that existing customers don’t like. How do you keep legacy users feeling valued?
• Parallels to other Categories:  How do learnings from the gaming category translate to other businesses, such as retailers to food delivery, vacation/travel rewards, and more?   How should marketers approach change to ensure new app improvements will be welcomed by their customers versus turn them off?