How Gamification is opening new doors for marketers

Gamification

Gamification is opening new doors for businesses and marketers across a variety of campaign activation’s and marketing objectives.  Gamification provides a platform to develop highly engaging interactions with brands and become more distinctive within their industry. When first introduced to the market, gamification was used to take boring, unmotivating tasks and add additional elements such as leader boards and badges to motivate and encourage interactions with the brand. However, the key learning for the industry was that not enough attention was placed on user experience and purpose with the ‘games,’ resulting in most audiences leaving because the task was still seen as boring. Early adoption of gamification has demonstrated that it is extremely difficult to create a product or service that is as addictive as a game. This is reflected through the inconsistencies in ‘successful’ business related games, with many developers finding luck in ‘one off’s’. Initially, gamification was introduced to generate a high level of interest (due to perceived potential). Today it is utilised to solve a key challenge for marketing – building audience engagement. Research suggests that three elements must work in combination with each other at the same time for an actionable behaviour to occur: motivation, ability and trigger.

In addition to this, Gamified systems must:

1. Give users motivation to do something (emotional investment, promise of reward, etc.).
2. The ability to complete the action.
3. And finally, a trigger or cue to complete the action.

Customers today expect more than value, convenience and simplicity from their preferred loyalty programs. Brands increasingly need to do more to stand out from the completion. By adding gamification as part of any marketing and customer experience strategy, brands and businesses can drive greater insights into their audience’s behaviour.