One thing that Squid games taught us is that games are for every age group, regardless of where they reside or their nationality.
The concept of games is not new, but the usage of game elements in business is. Consider this: what if learning was more enjoyable in school or at university, or if you could complete your work with greater enjoyment? It is made possible by gamification.
What is Gamification?
Sebastian Deterding a very know personality in the research field defines gamification as the use of the game design elements in the non-game context.
Gamification is not game but creating an environment with the help of game elements that motivate and engage during the process. There are many frameworks that try to explain and categorise game elements, mainly Gamification revolves around Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics.
Popular Game elements used by Businesses
Mostly used Gamification Mechanics by businesses in marketing to make a system more challenging, social and entertaining for customers are badges, point systems & leaderboards. Mechanics allows designers to have control over the game and gives developers the opportunity to guide the player towards an action.
By doing this organisations meets the customer’s expectations, and improve revenue and customer engagement.
Gamification is getting popular over the last 10 years, which creates a competitive environment for businesses to seek an extraordinary way of marketing to get an edge over their competitors.
Large organisations like Samsung, Heineken, Coca-Cola etc. are successfully engaging customers with their brands by using gamification for their marketing strategies.
Gamification seeks to foster customer experience (e.g. competition) through game elements (e.g. badges, leaderboards etc), that motivate customers to achieve personal objectives.
Gamification examples
Nike, Autodesk and GiffGaff are some of the notable examples of gamification marketing. A self-adjusting adjusting (challenge game mechanic) is an example from the Nike+ application. Nike launched a running application and achieved 28 million active athletes.
Gamification elements used in the Nike+ application are feedback, rewards, challenges, user level, progress bar and goals. But in the year 2016 Nike removed some mechanics from the application. By doing so Nike application saw a drastic drop in terms of the application users and the reason behind this was an increase in dissatisfaction after using the running application.
The benefit that Nike gets is the increase in the number of users, views, engagement, and product sales (170 million, maximum from Nike+). The feedback system (sound of applause) and social loop are used to motivate customers.
My Starbucks Rewards
Starbucks uses a gamification approach for increasing customer loyalty and brand engagement. The customer who becomes part of the Starbucks Rewards system by creating an account (Starbucks website or application) can collect stars after every purchase.
The customers can trade collected stars with different Starbucks products (for example drinks). Starbucks gives motivation and a feeling of achievement to the customers that if they are loyal to the brand (in the sense of buying a product) they will be rewarded back.
Oreo
Twist, Lick, Dunk Oreo launched an application-based game for marketing purposes that became popular worldwide and the best performing branding game ever launched. Gamification elements like ranking, score, leaderboard and virtual currency are used in building an Oreo application.
Elements that are used in the above examples by different organisations are Feedback, Leaderboard, progress bar, goals, point system, and competition. These elements will play a pivotal role in designing gamification in marketing.
To read more about Gamification: GAMIFY YOUR DIGITAL STRATEGY: DESIGNING A BOARD GAME BY USING GAMIFICATION AS A TOOL
