Today’s 10 Year Old Is a Different Consumer

The kids just finished up a week of Digital Media Academy. We eased them into their first quasi college-like experience with something they could definitely relate to: Adventures in Game Design with Minecraft. It was another small step toward helping them see technology as something you ‘make’ in addition to something you ‘use.’ Although it was educational, it had all the aspects of good old summer ‘fun and games.’ But, maybe the upcoming generation – the tail end of Generation Z – will experience goods and services more like that anyway.

At about the same time I was learning about the kids' experiences, I was catching up with Robert Zepeda, founder and CEO at Playbasis, a gamification platform that seems to be bringing new thinking to real actionable engagement. For a while, Rob and I have discussed how gamification principles can impact work, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, B2B and supply chain. Oversimplified - Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social challenges. Kevin Werbach has a great lecture series about the fundamentals at The Wharton School, and it’s available on Coursera.

Rob and I talked about some of the mechanics that overlap with serious business applications, including achievements, appointments, behavioral momentum, bonuses, cascading information theory, collaboration, deadlines, discovery, risk aversion, ownership, urgency, and others. There’s a more comprehensive list of mechanics at Gamification Wiki.

We talked through companies that seem to have made some progress, for example:

• Live Ops built a portal on Bunchball's Nitro platform to train its representatives remotely. The community featured missions for people to learn to complete calls faster and improve customer satisfaction – with point incentives. It had an 80% adoption rate and users outperformed non-users by 23%, with an average 9% higher rate of customer satisfaction. Training time dropped from four weeks to 14 hours. And, ‘winners’ ended up making more money.
• Deloitte uses digital games for its Leadership Academy, an executive education program it uses to train clients and its own consultants. Users receive virtual badges after completing training courses and "unlock" more complex courses when basic levels are completed.
• PricewaterhouseCoopers built a recruiting game where potential candidates are invited to participate in the virtual reality world of PwC as trainees who simulate working for the company. Each player has a different mission and plays on a team with other candidates. Players (i.e. candidates) attend training, join a community, negotiate with clients, and solve numerous tasks for points that get them closer to being hired. PwC said that use of the game has increased the number of initial applications and that successful players ultimately required shorter training programs later.
• Pep Boys uses a game to increase safety awareness in stores and service centers. They indicated that after implementing gamification as part of training, safety incidents went down more than 45 percent.
• Ford added gamification to its learning portals to help sales and service teams become more familiar with new car models, financing plans, technologies and options. After testing and implementing the methodology, Ford's learning portal saw a 417 percent increase in use and higher engagement resulted in better sales and customer satisfaction. Astrazeneca used a similar game concept to educate agents about new medicines.

Small tools, influenced by simple game mechanics can be used to modify people’s behavior. There are a lot more examples at Mario Herger's Enterprise Gamification.

There is a long way to go to make some mundane tasks more engaging. I think the paradigm that rang true the most this week, especially after talking with the kids about their experiences – is that we need to start thinking about customers, consumers, employees and/or students less as ‘Users’ and more as ‘Players.’ Are there ways to enjoy the experience of buying, procuring, working and learning? It might be a better way for us to consider interacting with Generation Z and those who come after them.

Written in Collaboration with Robert Zepeda.