Zaia's Response to Marketing Your Simfiles

I'll share a few experiences with how I developed the Zaia brand (It's a brand, that's exactly what it is - there is a name attached to the content and it carries influence, aesthetic, and feeling, just like how a designer brand in the fashion world connotes something similar)

Before Cirque i had 2.5 packs: The first, from 2009, was named S21 Works, the second, Powerglove, from late 2010, and an Australian community pack named Dropbear Awareness Pack from later in 2011. Until Cirque came out, I had two simfiles in the public sphere: Superluminal and VLSI, and at the time, some upcoming content in Tachyon Delta (The Scales of Struggle and Xenon). This gave me a platform when it came to producing my own content, particularly Superluminal, which had had two years of circulation time. S21 Works received highly negative feedback, Powerglove received a release to little reception and Dropbear Awareness only existed within the local circles. Because of these packs, I knew I was not ready for a stronger presence and/or had to go back to the drawing board and plan it better and observe the trends, which I did for a period of time, resulting in the creation of the Cirque series.

The Cirque series isn't an incidental or random creation. The brand was built with a purpose from it's very genesis, with framework laid down for multiple instalments and common themes across them.

The name 'Cirque du xxxxx' name comes from, as some will know, the French Cirque du Soleil series of performance art entertainment. Each Cirque had a unique name, often something exotic and only associable with Cirque. If some of you are aware, the 'Cirque du ZAiA' show that was performed in 2008 had a factor in the development of the simfile brand name Zaia, and people who know what my cdtitle looks like, will be able to see the reference to that. Cirque shows always had a unique theme, and each act worked towards the development of that theme, exploring a range of different ideals and fantasies and expressed and fulfilled using a myriad of different athletic and dexterous talents. Being a massive melting pot of talent, it had the right ideological framework for what I was attempting to create.

Cirque du Beast was the first in the series, and its purpose was to determine what was popular and what people wanted to play. That's why there are high bpm stamina simfiles, low bpm stamina simfiles, speed simfiles, resteps of existing simfiles, and even a rogue 9 (The template pack was Disbalance 3). It was intended to work as a sampler, of my best stuff to date + a few new things, showcasing and testing what I could produce as a stepartist, and seeing if my music interests were shared by others. This is the connecting thread between the philosophy of Cirque du Soleil and Cirque simfiles. You'll also notice music artists were shared with other popular packs of the time (Metea11, Sharpnel, SSH, Dimrain47, Vocaloid, M1dlet), all to boost recognition and decrease the anxiety over playing a chart from a music artist you had never heard of before. From all this, it is possible for one to say that Cirque du Beast really was a 'circus' of different things (of Beasts, namely, because if you were playing this pack, you were a beast).
The actual wording of the name was also important - it started with the letter 'C', placing it near the top of the song wheel, and near keystone stamina packs, specifically, Dragonforce and the trending Disbalance series. It's no coincidence that I intentionally chose a name that would put it near those packs. This is all part and parcel of the marketing process, however subtle it may be, which existed and was engineered to be so. 'Cirque du' also allowed successive titles to be attached to the end, allowing for a series that stayed on the songwheel together, and allowed more room for creativity than 1, 2, 3 etc. Initially there was only going to be three of them, all of similar content, but the reception and feedback of Beast would bring that into re-evaluation.
Beast had individual graphics and a fallback, but these were not well-received. My slight colorblindedness made things a bit difficult and also helps to explain my personal obsession with black and white. Learning from this experience, the successive pack (entitled Cirque du Brute), would feature a fallback graphic. Not only does this cater to convenience (and allowing me to focus on producing content), I believe it acts as a psychological glue between the simfiles - it helps to unify the pack and give it an impact that is greater than the sum of its parts. When you see a fallback banner, you know immediately 'This simfile is from THAT pack', before you even read the title of the simfile. It didn't matter what the simfile was - if someone posted a score of it, you knew precisely where it had come from, and where one could potentially find more of it. With this in mind, the graphics needed to be memorable. I'm not very good at Photoshop, and my color recognition is not good, so I can't produce good high-impact colorful graphics (I was a fan of Cosmic Pope graphics with big thick fonts and moods attached to the coloring). I needed to dig out my own niche and make that work. Veyron's eventual tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating graphics developed to meet my requirements, although the entire pack itself was sort of never meant to be, so the graphic was produced with little thought paid to quality. That's when it became about the cars, which is another story, but related to the points I raise in this post.

(Cirque du Brute eventually evolved into Cirque du Veyron, and most of the content was fragmented out into later packs where appropriate: Veyron, Lykan, Zonda and Zeppelin, with the rest abandoned or dormant).

The point I'm trying to make here, however, is to reinforce what @@ is saying and to show how I used his points in practice to develop my own brand. Could one call it a coincidence, or a fortunate turn of events? Maybe - I have definitely been lucky over the years and have had good company looking after me and good timing, but this all had to be developed from a conscious choice to do X thing at a given time. It was certainly easier back then, because the niches hadn't been as filled as they are now, but if you're sufficiently good, someone will take notice