Gamification in Content Marketing

“The process of employing game mechanics and game techniques to non-game environments in order to engage and motivate people in order to complete their tasks is called gamification.”

The term Gamification was coined by Nick Pelling in 2003, but gained popularity around 2010 when companies like Zynga and Badgeville started to use it describe their behavior platforms. This technique leverages people’s innate need for competition, achievement, status, altruism and community collaborations. When people hear the word gamification, they envision games made for organizational purposes. But gamification does not necessarily mean creating a new game. It is about amplifying the core experience offered by an organization, by applying the motivational techniques that makes a games highly engaging activity. Gamifying core touch points between the organization, its customers and partners helps in driving sales, building loyalty and higher customer satisfaction.

The entire idea of gamification is built around core game mechanics:

• The first and foremost is clearly defined long and short term goals to achieve. There are challenges that the user faces which engages them and on clearing challenges they are rewarded.
• A reward system which is a tangible measure of the user’s accomplishments. This point system needs to be transparent so that everyone knows where they stand in comparison to their peers or community, a well-designed leaderboard which shows who is just ahead and behind as well as rankings based on a number of measurable metrics.
• The process of onboarding a new user. Just like video games train how to play by giving simple and easily achievable tasks in the beginning, this engages the user immediately as they master simple tasks rather than being put into an entirely unfamiliar system.
•  Instant feedback makes the user confident about what they are doing and can also be used to mould behavior. Congratulating users for reaching goals, encouraging them to take the next step and rewarding acceptable behavior are ways for instant feedback.
• Everyone has a secret need for appreciation and games fulfil this by increasing the user’s status within communities as rewards for long term or sustained achievement. The term used for this levelling up which means gaining points, badges, unlocking new challenges and these are visible to the rest of the community.
• Making users parts of teams to collaborate and achieve larger tasks, drive competition and encourage knowledge sharing. When team members feel, they are contributing to the success of the group they work harder and are more engaged because no one wants to let their team down.

The results of gamifying a process can be measured by using certain tangible metrics, by keeping an eye these metrics organizations can analyse and fine tune their offerings and the gamification process itself to gain maximum positive results out of the entire process. The major question that arises is what are the main metrics that need to be analysed to gain maximum insight into the process of gamification. A few important metrics are:

• Engagement

It is by far the most important metric to gauge the success of the process, since engagement is a very broad term a number of other metrics are grouped into it. If the engagement metric is high, then other metrics will also be naturally high. Some standard engagement metrics are:

1. Unique Visitors
2. Time spent per user
3. Frequency of visits
4. Depth of visit
5. Conversion

• Influence

Over a period of time gamification can give the organizations influence over the action of the users. This could include user generated content for your product on other platforms. This could also include your content going viral due a large sphere of influence through social media, direct online contact and word of mouth.

• Loyalty

This means users are more likely to choose your brand over other competitors and is not open to a sales pitch to switch to another brand. Loyal users are open to trying out other experiences offered by your brand, they trust the organization and are more co-operative if any issue arises, banking on the company to solve it readily.

Gamification in Marketing

It wasn’t long ago, when marketers had relatively few ways to spread their messages and most of them were plain and simple. The primary form of brand communication was print advertising. Then came the various broadcasting channels like TV and radio and thus broadcasting advertising was born- a surefire way to introduce your product/ brand to the largest audience. And with the advent of the internet, we are in the digital age and it sure has eclipsed the broadcast age with heavy involvement of data analytics and thus improved targeting. But in this digital age, in spite of all the technological advances, it has become more difficult to engage people with attention spans getting smaller and the ‘clutter’ all around getting larger.

One very characteristic and also a big driver of present digital age is the rise of smartphones. And of this smartphone culture, a big inherent part is the gaming culture it has gradually developed over time. Today consumers are spending unexpectedly on games in the form of in-app purchases. For instance, in 2015, one of the most popular mobile game ever, Candy Crush had revenues totalling $1.8 billion from mobile devices in the form of in-app purchases. To put this in perspective, Nestle India’s 2015 revenue totalled around $1.2 billion.

Advent of smartphones has made sure that gaming is no longer a deed of a group of enthusiastic group of nerds shouting away in their headphones at people sitting across the internet. Gone are the days when gaming was restricted specifically to bulky PCs or laptops.

Gaming, in its essence, has always been ingrained in our cultures. And it has inadvertently, driven to fore, the concept of mobile advertising/marketing too. Another concept which has gained prominence albeit in a new digital avatar is Gamification.

Gamification is not a new concept or a recent tool in the arsenal of marketers. We all have in our childhood, collected cold drink bottle caps with our favourite cricketers on them or packets of various items with coupon codes to redeem them ‘lucky draw’ prize. And how can we forget Tazos, once found in every packet of chips made by Frito-Lays. It has always been used by marketers to increase consumer engagement. It is an age old but quite a subtle way to push more sales than what the demand demarcates. 

(Fig 1: A brief history of Gamification being used in various forms by marketers)

Gamification is being increasingly used as a form of content marketing today. Why? Because gamification incorporates fun and an element of competition to a marketing strategy. As a marketer

• Gamification makes your customers Feel Good and Gain Approval from other participants.
• Communities give your customers a sense of Belonging.

Gamification + Communities = 150% Increased Engagement.

According to an academic study done by Richard Bartle in 1980s, there are four kind of players (For marketers, it translates to personality types)

• Achievers – These are those player types who play games to win. They thrive on achievement and are very result-oriented. The like to compare themselves with others and track their progress. Almost 105 of the populations fall under this category.
• Socializers- These are the lightweight, non-confrontational, easy to reciprocate social interactions, type of people. 80% of populations fall under this category and hence are the most important from a marketer’s point of view
• Explorers- These are the players who are looking after some sort of social credit for having discovered something in the game
• Killers- They are very similar to achievers but they are not just satisfied with winning- they want others to lose. They comprise of less than 1% of population

Marketers currently focus primarily on the first two categories as they encompass most of the population and are easy to be targeted and engaged. It becomes imperative to understand what type of player their target consumers fall in as depending on that the game (here the marketing strategy) needs to be devised- You can not expect a group of achievers to just play a game with no reward or progress report to track their play. Similarly, a group of socializers are more content with interacting with others, play the game for entertainment purposes- having specific rewards or progress report wouldn’t be the best utilization of company’s resources at hand.

Examples of successful application of Gamification

• Nike+

One of the most popular and successful applications of gamification, is the Nike + app. The app was launched in 2012 to engage with the running community and create a better brand connect. With the Nike + , users can track, share, challenge and interact with friends and running buddies across the world. There is a leaderboard which displays the ranks of users. People can share their results on social media and earn badges and trophies.

It helps Nike in two ways-

1. Whenever people share their results it increases their brand presence and visibility on various platforms
2.  It helps them collect invaluable data about users which will increase R&D productivity and marketing efforts

It left Nike with endless possibilities and Nike used them to further their consumer engagement better than before. They came out with an activity tracker, FuelBand to complement their Nike + app. They also came out with another app Zombies Run! The app can be connected to FuelBand running. The music from the playlist will be interrupted with radio messages about the runner being chased by zombies; after hearing the warnings one may need to run faster until he/she have reaches the safe zone, or run to pick up the cure for the zombie creating virus. The app makes mundane running more interesting and creates a mission out of an everyday run. 

• Coke Zero’s ‘Drinkable Advertisement’

One of the most innovative and most creative application of gamification for a product can be seen in this Coca Cola ad. The problem for Coca Cola was that 80% of millenials had not tried Coke Zero, but 60% goo n to re-purchase it once they have tasted it.

To get more people to try out Coke Zero, Coca Cola partnered with Shazam to come up with a drinkable campaign. Coca Cola came up with and ad which had Coke being poured in the TV sets.  People could Shazam (app) the spot which would pour the coke right on to the people’s phones. Every interaction ended with a free Coke Zero that could be redeemed at major retail stores across the US. The campaign wasn’t restricted to just the screens- it was also aired on radio and the same process was followed. Print ads ran all across which could be made into cups, flyers into straws. The campaign ran across social media also- people had to pour Coke Zero in 140 characters. There were even drinkable digital posters which and Shazam turned phones into digital straws.

It resulted in 25% redemption rate (which is very high for coupon redemption)

(The ‘drinkable commercial’ can be watched here)

(The concept of the campaign and its summary can be watched here)

• Bar Stock Exchange

This one is much closer home than the previous examples. It is a chain of bar & restaurants which made the usual way of drinking (although not mundane to start with) a bit more fun and engaging for the consumers. They use real-time pricing to drive demand. The prices of various alcoholic beverages keep on increasing with demand. The constant increase in price creates a sense of urgency and leads consumers to buy more and drive up the sales. They even have an app to check the prices and book the drinks beforehand.

It is an example of how even small local businesses can differentiate themselves in such a crowded category by sensibly applying gaming concepts in their businesses.

Endless Possibilities

Brands today have just scratched the surface when it comes to using gamification as a tactic in their marketing strategies. As we have seen above, gamification is a process which is being refined from time-to-time, uncovering many important insights about human behaviour. For instance, loyalty programs brought a very important behavioural insight to light- Status and not cash is the biggest motivator for people.

Talking about current approach, marketers today are not much focussed on the ‘Killer’ players. On the contrary, they should be focussed more upon as they are the most active and engaged with the brand. Marketers should look upon them as an opportunity and turn their behaviour from negative to positive and the same bad press would be singing praises about them.

Or the leader board system. Not every user when starting out, gets motivated by top players at levels seemingly impossible for him/her to approach.

One thing is evident, like most things in marketing, Gamification too isn’t an exact science. There are no absolutes to it. With correct application of Gamification, anything can be made exciting- fun and theme are uncorrelated (as shown by Nike +). And with Gamification being rapidly being brought into the marketing fold, exciting time lie ahead for everyone involved, especially the consumers.

(Co-authored by Ruchir Sahai. First published as an article for Brandscape- an annual marketing chronicle by IIFT, Delhi)