Gamification: getting consumer interaction for free
Gamification can get consumers and staff engaged with your brand without spending millions on advertising, said Colin Cardwell, CEO of 3rd Sense Design.
Speaking at the Mumbrella360 conference, Cardwell said using gaming elements can effectively motivate people to interact with your brand for free.
“What [gamification] translates to is about using the same tools a game designer uses in a non-game environment to motivate people to do things without paying them real money or tangible rewards,” said Cardwell.
Strategy director of PHD, Chris Stephenson, said his company had recently started using gaming elements to optimise real-world situations.
“Everything you do in our agency you now get points for,” Stephenson said. “Every single action you take, every plan you make, every definition, every idea developed, you get what are called ‘pings’ for. And we’ve now got a global leaderboard for that.”
“Behaviours that we want to disproportionately encourage will get disproportionate pings. So if you’re wanting to optimise your media spend you can beat an econometric model in a server in New York, if you can get a better one-plus reach than that server can, you’re getting a thousand pings for doing so, a disproportionate award for being able to do that. And extrinsically we’ve got a global leaderboard.”
Cardwell said gamification had the potential to create brand loyalty without needing to make a sale.
“The huge advantage about gamification-based loyalty programs … is that you can apply it in situations where a sale doesn’t have to take place. Because you are not rewarding with tangible rewards and that motivation is something that doesn’t cost money and you can apply it in all kinds of areas,” said Cardwell.
Stephenson said PHD was showing how gamification could have a huge impact on staff loyalty.
“We have one framework which works across seventy countries,” he said. “Over fifteen-hundred people currently playing at strategy and planning and optimisation of investment. And those people are intrinsically motivated to help each other … There’ll be an epic win for the person who’s committed and leaned into this the most and who has engaged the most in the system.”
“You’re creating an experience where it’s a physical and emotional experience too,” said Marigo Raftopoulos, doctoral researcher at GEElab, who was also speaking at the conference. “It adds to that playful element. How we connect with the product and the brand is very different to what it has been before. So it’s not just cognitive it’s experiential as well.”
Damon Meredith
