Gamification is emerging as a dynamic force in the marketing arena, and it can be a powerful tool to drive awareness, demand, and customer engagement. Understanding what gamification is, and how it can best be applied within the marketing domain is key to get the best value from it.
Gamification Defined
First, a definition: gamification, according to Wikipedia, is the “use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context to engage users”. In the marketing arena, this means using elements of games to help drive participation, engagement, and loyalty.
Gamification is not about adding a game to your marketing program. The marketing program IS your game. Gamification is about using game mechanics to make the core experience more game-like: more challenging, more competitive, more collaborative, more playful, and more rewarding. Examples of gamification are all around us:
- Frequent flyer programs
- Merit badges for Boyscouts
- Sales incentive programs
- Grades in school
- etc.
What Are Game Mechanics?
Game mechanics are tools and feedback mechanisms that leverage our basic human needs and desires. These human needs include concepts like competition, collaboration, reward, status seeking, discovery and exploration, mastery building, goal achievement, and self-expression. Common examples of game mechanics include:
- Points
- Badges
- Levels
- Challenges
- Leaderboards
Gamification allows marketers to use these kinds of mechanisms to “gamify” an activity or program by tracking user actions, and providing feedback and rewards that encourage desired behavior. With this kind of toolkit, marketers can create compelling, engaging user experiences that motivate their prospects, customers and partners.
Gamification for Marketing
Gamification has been applied across a broad range of business domains and applications, including recruiting and retaining employees, enhancing customer loyalty programs, encouraging exercise and healthy behavior, and delivering engaging education and training. In the marketing domain specifically, there are a number of key areas where gamification has been proven to deliver value:
1. Prospect awareness and engagement
- Event promotion
- Product launches
- Interactive marketing campaigns
- Prospect education/trial/conversion programs
- Website engagement
2. Customer loyalty and revenue generation
3. Partner loyalty
4. Sales motivation
In future blog posts, we will drill into each of these areas and look more closely at the goals and strategies for gamification, as well as some case studies showing what works (and what doesn’t).
Stay tuned!
Dan Maier has spent the past 2 years working with one of the leading gamification companies.