Gamification in Retail Space

It isn’t a memory from the far past when we’d go to shopping malls and the open space right in the front where we have various products showcased with colourful ribbons and the company representatives dressed in colourful dresses and inviting you to  play a little game with them and win prizes of sorts. This is as we understand a friendly lure to try the product out by means of the game that we play. The primary motive of such a move was to make the user experience effortless and rather enjoyable while getting introduced to the product.

As the mall culture is getting digitized, we discover that the gaming strategy from the physical retail scene has also become digital. The common examples are the little pop-up kind of boxes on the websites you visit that present little light games like, how many baskets you can do in a minute with the basket balls and the basket or how many flies can you catch in the fly catcher etc. These games are deliberately kept easy to play so that the user is interested to play and plays the entire length of the game so that once the game is played to the full length, the game redirects us to a new tab or a new window from the same browser to the website or the direct link to a product for sale online or even for the same reason to a blog link.

There is a non official term for this called gamevertising. As we know, the digital space is an endless dense jungle. Quick earning is easy as well because there are payment schemes based on the number of clicks. So basically people work on very niche ideas that easily gather the attention of millions of internet users in the shortest count of time. Gamevertising is one of the nice ways which is almost foolproof in getting attention as well as engagement.

Following are the multiple benefits you get from gamification:

Customer acquisition: Customer acquisition becomes really easy with Gamification on slightly serious levels. It is instantly attractive to the customers and you can get a lot of interested eyes in a short while. This can be further enhanced with various introductory offers and reward system that makes your first step extremely promising. As a matter of fact, this ensures a long term effect which helps getting an assurance on the retention of the customers.

Brand awareness: Gamification is surely an idea to rely on without any second opinion for spreading brand awareness. The more interesting or fun the game is, the more awareness you spread. How exactly? Imagine you just launched a bakery product (say cookie) and immediately you released a game that helps you make cookies with the raw ingredients provided in  the game interface. This game basically evaluates your cookie making skills on basis of various parameters like ingredients, temperature of the oven, time taken etc. The best preparation gets recorded and goes to a global ranking. The higher the rank, the better   Just imagine after one propagates about the game, how many more users you will attract only to play the game. This is one simple yet effective way to spread the awareness.

Boosting social media interaction: With the facility to tag your friends available on almost all platforms of social media, the chances of getting more and more people to know about your brand get better. So for example if you play a game released by a brand for its product promotion and you score really well. First of all, providing a feature to share your score on your user profile which is publicly visible will draw a lot of curious eyes. Adding to that, if you get a chance to tag your friends on the game scoreboard just to challenge or display your personal best scale will the take the curiosity to the next levels.

Customer retention: Taking the gaming to next levels you can easily retain customers. It depends on what you choose to do with the data acquired from the results of the users who played the game. Say again for example, you roll out an offer that by some standard calculation, based on the previous score or the overall score by playing, you will be offering discounts on your next purchase.

Bonus income: Like earlier mentioned, Gamification in the retail space can bring you a heavy bonus income. Based on the number of clicks earned on the game pop-up or the official page. Also, media houses incorporate this idea by releasing free games in the app store as the official games based on the theme of the movie they are releasing. This helps in firstly establishing their presence as well as the number of clicks and downloads help them earn some extra bit of money.

All in all, gamification in the retail space is a win-win deal.