Play. Level Up: Gamification & Marketing
Imagine waking up one fine day to find out that you have been knighted for being a ‘Speed Dragon Slayer’; or, you have been rewarded a badge of honour as ‘Law Abiding Citizen #1’ in your neighbourhood. Even better, you receive the option of free tickets to a game or discount coupons from your favorite pizzeria on a match day.
These could be some of the perks of adhering to the speed limits in your city, without violating any, for an extended period of time.
Such positive reinforcements for motorists, motivating them to mindfully reduce violation of traffic laws, can make our roads safer and at the same time, reduce the administrative stress on public authorities. It’s the gamification of traffic management to transform human behavior for the better.
Gamification as a tool for engagement has long been intrinsic in non-gaming environments. It may have predated history, as homo sapiens scoured the grasslands for trophy hunting to determine community status or to mark rites of passage.
Whether to spur consumption (e.g. frequent flyer programs) or to decrease it (e.g. personal finance apps to reduce spending), build a loyal customer base (e.g. reward programs based on number of cups of coffee bought) & enhance engagement (e.g. physical workout tracking apps to measure performance), create network effects (e.g. assign profile status based on followers and connections) or simply, boost innovation & creativity (e.g. hackathons and competitive platforms), gamification when leveraged with the appropriate game elements, can create wonders, helping one achieve whatever they seek to from the product, service or platform.
A Google Trends comparison between two fairly commonly used words during the pandemic, ‘gaming’ & ‘learning’, indicate an equally high degree of global interest in both of these. Occasionally, their trend lines even mirror each other.
However, when comparing interest-level trends between ‘PUBG’ the online game (a proxy to ‘gaming’) and ‘Coursera’, the MOOC platform (a proxy to ‘learning’), the differences in level of interest are to the ratio 1:10 (approximately) respectively.
Of course, PUBG as a product is far more secular in terms of who can use it; also it is intrinsically a game (and that too, a wildly popular one) & a platform, whereas Coursera is a learning platform with third party content providers, and usually attracts a certain segment of a demography or a psychography.
Although a platform, Coursera UI & UX offer little scope for a stimulating and a sustainable interaction between the learner and the platform itself. A majority of the courses leverage gamification in the form of quizzes, peer-reviewed capstone projects or learning sessions that employ gamified learning tools.
Beyond this, there is hardly much. The basis of time spent on Coursera is mainly owing to the courses offered by the institutions on the platform, and has very little to do with the platform itself.
Meanwhile, PUBG provides for an out-of-skin (pun implied) experience to the player. An MMORPG, the game mechanics and experience design have built a huge loyal community of members by leveraging customization and community-driven features development.
But then, what could be a good starting point for marketeers and product managers, when seeking to build gamification features or campaign for the customer?
The Octalysis Framework, pioneered by You-kai Chou is a benchmark model that is effective in mapping out the objectives of the campaign. Going beyond the ‘Points, Badges, Leaderboard’ (PBL) formula, the framework focuses on human-centric gamification design, that revolves around eight aspects — Meaning, Empowerment, Social Influence, Unpredictability, Avoidance, Scarcity, Ownership, Accomplishment.
There is a plethora of publicly available literature on the Octalysis Framework, for those interested to delve deeper. Summarizing, Octalysis can help design game elements that tap into the customer’s desire to be more than who she is in the real world.
The gamified experience provides a sense of epic meaning, calling and accomplishment, laced with a minimal fallout from the failure to achieve a task, to the customer.
Gamification could be employed with varying effects through the different stages of the Customer Decision Journey — to build awareness, establish higher brand recall, create more points of sale, to build engagement & loyalty and finally to drive customer-driven marketing.
Additionally, unlike in a physical business environment, the final incentive for the player could be financial or non-financial, depending on the objective and the context for which it is designed.
Casual gaming elements enhance the success of gamification, as smaller attention cycles kick in a Zeigarnik Effect (unfinished tasks have a higher memory recollection), thus helping the marketeer achieve her objective.
From dairy products on retail shelves to SaaS-based products, gamification is being increasingly employed by product managers and marketeers, to amplify their go-to-market, customer on-boarding and to build a loyal community.
A study by Gartner highlights that 70 per cent of companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list use gamification techniques and that 50 per cent of innovation processes will be gamified in the coming years. As opposed to stereotypes, the average age of a gamer is 35-years old, while 68 per cent of gamers are over the age of 18-years old.
Surely enough, gamification is no child’s play. Nonetheless, it may hold an even bigger promise for marketeers, as they jostle for attention in the years to come.
