🎮 Repositioning a Gaming Data Leader to Win Beyond Gaming Without Losing Its Core.

I joined a gaming data company as its founding product marketing manager, responsible for building the function from scratch. The company had spent roughly 10 years establishing itself as a trusted provider of live-streaming and verified audience data, particularly for gaming publishers. But after we merged that product with an acquired creator database and social-data business, our capabilities had outgrown our market identity. Customers were asking for a more holistic view of streaming, social, and creator audiences, while our narrow category label made prospects treat the company as a commodity tool rather than a strategic analytics platform.

That misalignment was limiting our growth beyond gaming into non-endemic brands and marketing agencies trying to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences. I saw the pattern in competitor analysis, win/loss reviews, sales calls, and prospect interviews. The question was whether we could expand our total addressable market without diluting the gaming expertise and brand equity that had made the company credible in the first place.

The company’s business objective was to expand beyond its niche reputation as a live-streaming data provider and grow into a broader market for brands and agencies reaching Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I owned the strategic interpretation of that rebrand: defining the priority audiences, positioning, messaging, and internal rollout, rather than simply executing a visual identity change.

The central constraint was credibility and a disagreement about how to grow. The CEO initially wanted to open the product to everyone, but I argued that opening the product to everyone would put the company into a crowded market and weaken the gaming expertise that made us distinctive. I had to broaden our appeal without abandoning the vertical that made us distinctive, and align Sales, Customer Success, Product, and leadership around that decision. Customer Success also needed confidence that the change would not undermine our existing game-publisher relationships. Using and , I recommended a : retain gaming as the core while presenting the company’s decade of gaming data as a specialized advantage for brands and agencies reaching gaming-native audiences. Success meant proving that the new positioning could attract and convert a broader audience without losing existing customers: website-to-demo conversion, lead-to-opportunity conversion in the new segment, campaign ROI, sales adoption of the new materials, and retention.

I started with a listening tour across the company, from individual contributors to the CEO, to surface Sales and Customer Success pain points and turn them into one narrative. I then analysed competitor positioning, internal sales calls, prospect conversations, and . The diagnosis was that buyers needed the whole story - streaming and social data together plus actionable insights - but the company was still positioning itself as only a streaming-data tool.

I used HubSpot to analyse won deals by segment and job title, then combined that evidence with sales calls and prospect conversations to identify where the company was already winning and form hypotheses about the new ideal customer. Its value was giving the positioning work a commercial starting point instead of relying on assumptions.

I used Claude AI agents to accelerate the research: drafting interview guides, developing persona hypotheses, summarising interview notes, and extracting the language buyers used. Claude was useful for pattern-finding and preparation, but I did not treat its outputs as evidence. I validated the hypotheses with real buyers and made the strategic calls myself—such as prioritising five segments, mapping the buying group, and choosing “creator marketing analytics built for gaming.”

I used Notion to plan the go-to-market rollout, including the shared brief, launch calendar, ownership, and supporting materials. I used for knowledge sharing, so Sales, Customer Success, Product, and leadership could access the latest positioning and launch information in one place. The distinction mattered: Notion helped me structure and manage the work, while Confluence helped distribute the agreed narrative across the organization.

Within the first quarter after launch, website-to-demo conversion rose from 0.25% to 13% - more than a 50x increase. In the new non-endemic segment, lead-to-opportunity conversion increased 15%, while campaign ROI improved 30%. Within three months, Sales usage of the new materials was up 50% compared with the previous quarter, measured through asset usage and call reviews.

The repositioning also changed how the organization and customers engaged with the offer. Sales could explain the company’s value to non-traditional buyers, and Customer Success identified new upsell and cross-sell opportunities with existing clients because the broader suite created more to sell. Existing-customer churn remained at 0% during the transition, and client feedback was positive.

The main lesson was that a category change starts with alignment; once teams used the same words, the commercial results followed.