SCM is Why We Exist
There's no actual mystery to the development of the program and the understanding of what people want/need from any particular website. The research has been there from the beginning. The appeal of users openly choosing to enter the program rather than being gently brought in by outside enforcers was one of the main goals of the campaign which drew from advice dating back to the early 2000's.
Originally the simulation started as a web-based MMO, which is what drove the initial adoption to the full simulated world in the beginning. The thing is, in order to drive that transition, there had to be an appeal to users both new and old to get on board with the transition and what it meant to give up their physical bodies in order to live extended lives in the virtual world.
How SCM wound up doing this was a multifaceted approach, putting the majority of their efforts into web-based advertising and going by the principle of the website itself acting as the "seventh touch", which was a common term for a marketing and education principle where repetition was key to ensure an idea/product stuck with any given person. Now, this idea was critical in many of the aspects of their web development and their success. Xiomara and I wouldn't exist if they hadn't done everything they could do to succeed, and I think she knows that.
A significant factor in assuring that this program was successful included the accessibility of the website and the game as a whole while in development. SMC's reviews were glowing with the praises of being one of the most intuitively designed websites for finding information on the program, highlighting key details about what the contract involved, having easy access to an agent to talk through questions not found in the Q&A section of the website, and how easy on the eyes the whole site was. Clarity was one of the guiding principles of the website, along with keeping enough visual interest to retain consumer interest and remain memorable.
These principles weren't just taken from some dartboard guessing what would work, it was based on research surrounding aesthetics, business-to-business communications, accessibility, and interaction-focused retention. This was all research done by universities like Xiomara's, or independent researchers who focused on web development and business as a whole and were published in journals like the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Behavior Information, and Technology, Journal of Technical Writing and Communications, and many, many others.
Even then, however, some of it was intuitive. In the 2010s, there were retention guides published that played a huge role in deciding what would/wouldn't be added to the site, and a lot of research was based on intuitive observations or reactions to poorly designed websites, such as some government websites of the era, which were found to be confusing and ineffective in communicating what users wanted to know.
Delving a little further, the story SCM had to tell in order to allow players to be OK with giving up something in exchange for what they were offering was a challenge. SCM as a company front had to demonstrate an overall positive story that would appeal to as many people as possible in order to make the transition to digital as smooth as they could. The whole segment of abductions and bringing in people against their will was a last resort in an attempt to preserve as many lives as possible before the facilities holding everyone's bodies were sealed.
Originally, they started with the brand story of making people's wildest dreams come true in a world where anything was possible, appealing to new and old users alike by mentioning that there was no barrier to entry and that users could choose whichever way they wanted to interact with the world, using the MMO website or trying out the new, fully virtual simulation. That was one story they repeated frequently, but as new user registrations declined, they came up with another story, which included a new method of getting users more invested just by using the advertisement.
What they did with the website was they added a "sample" portion of the game itself, where they gave people the opportunity to look around the new cities coming up, engage in questlines, and had those fully virtual give tours to folks, and describe how their bodies were adjusted to the simulation. Now these were a lot more compelling as a final touch, as new user registrations went from five thousand a month to fifteen thousand a month.
But that was not the sole factor in gaining those users, in fact, there were critical changes to the website that weren't the game samples that folks were seeing. Learning from e-government formats and their struggles to get users to actually, well, use the resources there, SCM continuously improved the layout of the site. Anytime they received a complaint about clarity, transparency, or confusion on the site, they would follow up with a questionnaire, and within the week those errors would be changed, along with a minimally invasive update banner to clarify where things had moved.
Each time, their user retention would go up by about two percent, meaning people were staying on the website longer, following up on details they wanted to know. This even improved the purchasing and donation rates for SCM, as sales increased by fifteen percent over the previous month for each major update, with donations increasing by twenty percent over the previous month for each major update. There was a sense of connection fostered by the stories SCM was telling, and by how their website was developed to be as user-friendly as physically possible.
That doesn't even begin to get into the business-to-business collaborations they were doing on the website to drive traffic both onto and off the site. This is also a lot of where Xiomara's confusion comes in about the whole thing. It's an instance of not knowing what business-to-business communication and collaboration on a website looks like. Towards the end of the major campaign to get more people just playing the game on either platform, there was a collaboration between SCM and several companies popular in the 2000s, including social sites like Facebook, X, BlueSky, LinkedIn, ArtStation, and many others.
However, the point is that every move SCM has made and continues to make is based on the research they've had access to from the very beginning. They also do the research themselves to ensure that their product is the best on the market. Since we have only known the monopoly of today, however, it's easy to forget that, and it's easy to forget that there are governmental forces from within and outside the entire simulation that have allowed SCM to become such a natural monopoly.
Before the shift to reinforcement of the Secure Conserve Manage Program as a governmental policy, there was some discourse on whether the company should even be considered a plausible solution to the issue of severe human impact and rapid escalation of the planet's declining health. There had been attempts by lobbying companies to convince some of the larger governments of the time (France, United Kingdom, China, and India) to ignore the SCM's pleas to make this service a part of government infrastructure.
Their concerns had been that SCM would develop a pay-to-play system that would only protect those with wealth and not everyone present in high-impact areas. The case was then made by SCM that they planned to include every individual human being, regardless of status. This solidified, in courts across the world, that there was a significant human need to consider the planetary breakdown, and how humanity should proceed going forward.
SCM was the only company that could fully address the questions of where people would go, what system would be implemented, how much it would cost to maintain, what quality of life people could expect going in and coming out of the simulation, what safety measures are in place to protect people, their data, and their physical bodies. The misunderstanding of SCM's mission and goals came from active misinformation attempts to paint it as a vanity project, despite their cheapest immersion console being only USD 15, which by any other tech company's standards at the time, was good enough reason alone to try and bargain for a price floor for virtual reality technology.
That being said, establishing the required need for humanity to be protected while at the same time allowing Earth to recover after humanity's damages to it allowed SCM to become a protected program and a government-affiliated project.
I've attached some of the research I cited in this particular breakdown. I found these in the massive open-access library, which SCM insisted on so we don't forget where things came from, with some thoughts of my own for each article. Please, take a quick look at my thoughts at the very least. Xiomara, you too, this is important, too important to ignore despite you not majoring in it.
Annotated Bibliography
Ahmad, J., Hardianti, Nilwana, A., Muliani, & Hamid, H. (2021). Digitalization Era: Website Based E-Government. IOP Conference Series. Earth and Environmental Science, 717(1), 12047-. https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/717/1/012047
The foundational article for the initial development of SCM's web development focuses on clarity, conciseness, and the importance of transparency to ensure users remain on-site. Motivated a lot of SCM's earlier website changes, including the update banners created to help guide users to new menus or explain where things went.
Bai, L., Arif, M., & Muhammad Arif. (2022). Artistic Design Method of User Interaction Experience of Mobile System Based on Context Awareness. Security and Communication Networks, 2022, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/6107046
Hall, R. H., & Hanna, P. (2004). The impact of web page text-background colour combinations on readability, retention, aesthetics, and behavioural intention. Behaviour & Information Technology, 23(3), 183–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290410001669932
Highlights just how important it is to have an accessible site, and what behaviors it encourages. SCM likely used this research to play into their appeal to consumers in broader strokes and applied it to certain ad campaigns.
Holliman, G., & Rowley, J. (2014). Business to business digital content marketing: marketers' perceptions of best practice. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 8(4), 269–293. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIM-02-2014-0013
Highlights the importance of business collaboration in decision-making making, marketing campaigns, and the importance of having similar goals in business. A significant stepping stone for SCM's research on who they wanted to work with, why, and how they predicted the collaboration would go.
Ligaraba, N., Chuchu, T., & Nyagadza, B. (2023). Opt-in e-mail marketing influence on consumer behaviour: A Stimuli–Organism–Response (S–O–R) theory perspective. Cogent Business & Management, 10(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311975.2023.2184244
Significant research into the importance of interaction in marketing, and how it can improve the odds of further user engagement. SCM originally started with some email marketing campaigns that rewarded current users for asking their friends to join in the first few years, which explains why they opted for on-site demos.
New York Web Design Company, Avatar, Lists 10 Website Features that Improve User Retention. (2017). In PR Newswire. PR Newswire Association LLC.
Common advice article highlights the majority of key web development concepts used to work on SCM's website. Highlights just how common this kind of knowledge was at the time.
Palmer, Z. B., Oswal, S. K., & Koris, R. (2021). Reimagining Business Planning, Accessibility, and Web Design Instruction: A Stacked Interdisciplinary Collaboration Across National Boundaries. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 51(4), 429–467. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281620966990
The significance and importance of accessibility, international collaboration on larger projects, and highlights just how much effort goes into a project like SCM. A good article also on how this kind of research was taught at the time, and how collaborative efforts began well before SCM became a public company.
Woodside, A. G. (2010). Brand-consumer storytelling theory and research: Introduction to a Psychology & Marketing special issue. Psychology & Marketing, 27(6), 531–540. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20342
This highlights the need for a brand story, how it can impact consumer decision-making, and how an overly repetitive story can easily wear out consumers. Another foundational research article in the development of SCM's program and campaign to drive more users to their site and services.
