Gamification for marketing

Think how involved we are when playing games. A lot of brands now are applying gamification in their marketing activities to boost customer engagement, which is showing great success. For example, Marks&Spencer, a major British multinational retailer, allows its loyal customers to exchange Sparks points for promotions or events. An Italian restaurant chain Pizzi launched an event on mobile where customers can play scratch card game inside the restaurants and getting prizes. 

The principle idea behind applying gaming to marketing is that it encourages users to progress with the event, boosting the level of engagement. When playing games like Candy Crush, to progress with the game, customers are very likely to do in-app purchase, watching an ads in exchange for an extra life or boost and competing with friends on Facebook. This high level engagement promote games revenue and also appearance on social media platforms. After all, marketers are trying to raise consumer engagement, especially now that ads blockers are becoming increasingly popular. Gamfication is a very good way to encourage consumers to take an active role in marketing activities. 

Reference: 

How brands are using gamification to boost engagement

http://www.marketingweek.com/2015/10/23/how-brands-are-using-gamification-to-boost-engagement/?cmpid=mwweekly_1699189&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=mw_weekly

Gamification Summit NYC 2011

I attended Gamification Summit in NYC over the last two days. There was great talk and discussion on how gamification is rapidly growing and impacting many important aspects of businesses, including consumer engagement, performance enhancement of enterprises, driving behavior, loyalty/engagement programs, and many other innovative and emerging marketing methods. For those who are not familiar with the term, in a nutshell, gamification is using game mechanics and dynamics to change behavior in a non-game setting. We talked about it in class, but location-based applications such as Foursquare, SCVNGR would be great examples of using game mechanics (i.e. badges, rewards, leaderboard, levels) in a real world.

Most talk involved how gamification is becoming increasingly bigger part of social media marketing. According to Garner Group, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. In fact, by 2015, 70% of the Global 2000 largest companies will be using gamification. As you can see from the graph above, spending on gamification as part of social media marketing is expected to explode over the next half decade (source and more info).

One of the speaker was the CEO of 42 Entertainment. I'm sure Professor Kagan is familar since he is in the entertainment industry. Check out their case studies -- including pre-launch of Dark Knight -- and see how they used gamification to drive up interest and consumer engagement prior to launches. Mashable also has a good information as to how to gamify your marketing efforts.

In closing, check out this video to see gamification at work! In the days of social media and digital marketing, I believe FUN is a must!

- Sam Ahn