Today’s Guest Blog is courtesy of our company CEO Andrew Peace and his blog andrewjpearce.com:
Gamification is not a new concept, but it seems to be one of the buzz words at the moment. With presentations, reports and analysis making the claim thousands more business’s will be ‘gamified’ within the next few years, our company thought we’d look beyond the hype and try to discover the real benefits for business and consumers alike.
The Gamification Summit (Jan 20-21 in San Francisco) has become one of the Tech events of the year, with speakers from Google, Microsoft, Playboy, NBC/Universal, Zynga and ng:moco all singing Gamification’s praises – but WHY?
Well, few activities are more engaging than a well designed game. By their nature, games encourage and facilitate exploration of virtual space and rewards players when they perform tasks, achieve goals and acquire skills – and when you think about it, this is precisely what your business needs to be doing for customers. By encouraging your website visitors to engage in certain activities and rewarding them for doing so, you transform the conversation process into something more akin to an interactive game.
The real value to brands is often not about using games, but rather using the techniques that make such games so addictive and successful, in order to achieve other things. Gamification is not about your brand finding the next Farmville, but instead, something more complicated and ultimately rewarding than this.
Understanding what people want to achieve and why they behave as they do has always been critical in marketing. What Gamification does is find the ways to use game mechanics to help people get where they want to get (and indeed, where we want them to get to) – whilst rewarding them and motivating them along the way.
According to the LA Times Companies will spend $2.8 billion per year on gamification by 2016. On face value, this seems staggering, but there is a very sound theory behind the claim.
Asides from encouraging users to stay longer on your site, come back more often, increase loyalty, and ultimately (hopefully) spend more money, Gabe Zichermann, Entrepreneur and author of the book ‘Game-Based Marketing’ said recently, “It turns out, the truth is, if you don’t have a ton of cash to give your customers to get them to take an action in your favour; then status is a great option. It’s a lot cheaper. And when you have a status benefit, you don’t need to give them as much cash, or in fact, any cash at all”
In this informative video, Gabe explains the best way to engage and incentivise your customers is to give them ‘Status, Access, Power, and Stuff’ – in order of most ‘sticky’ to ‘least sticky’- and (most importantly) cheapest to most expensive.
“Free stuff is only good for as long as it takes somebody to redeem that ‘thing’”, he continued, “Whereas Status is something people take pride in and want to continue attaining (or sustaining)”.
Gamification is providing marketers with a new, measurable discipline that can improve the quality of game-product interaction. Over the past decade, there have been a number of false starts between games and brands — notably in advergaming (fully brand-centric games) and in-game advertising (putting ads into fictional games). Neither of these categories has been hugely successful, mostly because they failed to take into consideration the user’s conflicting motivation for playing games and consuming commercials.
What Gamification does is allow marketers to focus on what they know best — convincing consumers to take loyalty and purchasing actions — using a powerful toolkit of engagement gleaned from games. Armed with a new understanding of what makes people tick, and how to wind them up, marketers can build experiences that are enduring and engaging.
And the good news is, that you don’t have to restructure your entire website to include a game layer. Several companies offer turnkey solutions that enable layering an incentive or reward system on top of your current website. Here are a few of the best, courtesy of entrepreneur.com:
Badgeville: Provides a social rewards and analytics platform to encourage website interaction.
BigDoor: Uses a widget that appears as a “MiniBar” on your website so customers can earn badges and points and gain access to leaderboards. The MiniBar encourages exploration and sharing that leads to engagement, loyalty and viral growth.
Bunchball: Promotes participation, loyalty and revenue via games for well-known brands, including Warner Bros., Comcast, Victoria’s Secret Pink, USA Network, LiveOps and Hasbro, all of which use Bunchball’s Nitro platform to create entertaining experiences for consumers and employees.
IActionable: Lets you create your own game-related reward system, including how your customers earn points. IActionable follows customer progress on your website and determines whether customers have earned points.
Reputely: Offers Gamification solutions aimed at user acquisition and retention.
Gamifying your website should add value to the user experience and thus motivate users to return again and again. Making a game of it not only rewards loyalty, but it also gives your customers the kind of information and experiences they will naturally want to share with their friends and colleagues
It’s possible to even the most dreaded activity fun if you turn it in to a game. Take Chromaroma for example who have made the unthinkable an actual reality; they’ve managed to make travelling on the tube fun – something I never thought I’d hear myself say. Nike+ have managed to making running fun as well!
Have you seen any interesting examples of Gamification? Has your company integrated games with your products? 10 points awarded per comment – I’m very intrigued.
