A recent buzzword among the manager folk is gamification. Some think it’s just another fleeting fashion, but Gartner predicts otherwise – by 2016, gamification will be used a standard practice to drive marketing and foster consumer loyalty. The truth is that gamification can already be traced in the mainstream of corporate management and several industry leaders draw visions of its dynamic growth in the future. Below I answer two important questions marketers wonder about: how does gamification work and can it serve as an effective content marketing tactic?
Why Gamification?
Gamificaion is nothing else than an application of game mechanisms and dynamics onto a non-gaming context, such as project management, training, recruitment or marketing. Gamification works in every area where engagement and motivation play crucial roles – using gamified strategies, marketers are able to drive specific consumer behavior, provide opportunities for further engagement with the brand and motivate consumers to perform tasks that require effort and time – in short, all the activities that in the traditional context would often fail to deliver promised results.
Gamification works by rewarding and recognizing the most talented players, who receive points and badges for their activities and their names appear on special leaderboards and scoreboards. Gaming elements appeal to the competitive side of humans and motivate consumers to perform tasks over and over again to achieve a better result. In gamified marketing situations, consumers rarely ever leave tasks half-done or abandon them – they’re simply motivated to finish them and reach the next level.
Gamification – Risks and Benefits
Gamification seems to be a perfect answer for all the challenges faced by marketers in engaging consumers with the brands, but sometimes gamification strategies can be risky. If poorly designed or badly conducted, games might simply fail to deliver the expected results and, moreover, have a disastrous effect on the brand’s image. Some games even spark controversy – remember the game launched by the US army, which gained quite a few negative reviews?
Gamification can disappoint and it does, more often than you might expect – in a recent report, Gartner stated that more than 80% of gamification strategies carried out in 2014 won’t achieve their goals due to poor design. (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2251015) Experts agree that in order to reach their goals, games must be carefully designed – progress tracking needs to be transparent, talented players properly recognized and feedback provided in real-time.
Games and Content Marketing
Gamification and content go hand in hand – marketers want consumers to interact with their content and engage with the brand and gamification can be just the right answer for that. Here are four different case studies that present some of the finest examples of content marketing campaigns designed with gamification strategies.
Heineken US Open Instagram Contest
A great example of a brilliantly executed social media campaign with a focus on visual content is Heineken’s Crack the US Open contest held last year on Instagram. (http://instagram.com/crack_the_us_open) Basically, Heineken compiled together over 200 photos and created a unique mosaic of tennis fans sitting on the stands. The ticket giveaway was based on a massive photo hunt and consumers could win tickets only after following a series of clues in photo captions. Reaching the final photo, users had to leave a specified comment and immediately won game tickets.
The photo hunt lasted only 3 days and comprised 7 individual events, during which a total of 1500 users participated and searched for clues on Heineken’s Instagram account. As a result, Heineken noted a 20% increase in follower number on their @Heineken_US account and enjoyed more exposure than ever of its role as one of the main US Open sponsors. Even though the photo hunt was quite a complicated task, consumers had their eye on the prize and felt motivated to go on and finish the photo hunt.
M&M’s Eye-Spy Pretzel
In 2013, M&M’s made a great content marketing move when it launched an incredibly successful game as a part of the M&M’s Pretzel campaign. The brand relied on a typical eye-spy game – on its official Facebook account, M&M’s published a large graphic design of scattered M&M’s, among which there was hidden one small pretzel. The task was simple: find the pretzel.
As you can imagine, M&M’s spent no time or money creating this simple game, but the results were breathtaking – the post went viral and generated over 25,000 likes, more than 6,000 shares and around 11,000 comments. Despite the fact that a lot of people would argue that looking for a small pretzel is a waste of time, the gamified context of the campaign made it relevant and inspired consumers to keep looking for the pretzel and shre the game with others. Have a look here to see the outcome of M&M’s game yourself. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151267849776957&set=a.131015676956.121420.30634981956&type=1&theater)
Pleasure Hunt by Magnum Ice Cream
In 2011, Magnum got inspired by skill games and created Pleasure Hunt (http://pleasurehunt.mymagnum.com/), a simple game that quickly went viral. The player simply had to control a ‘Magnum Woman’ and help her collect as many chocolates as possible. Nothing special, you’d say. But there was a catch.
The game began on Magnum official website, but the ‘Magnum Woman’ quickly moved to pages of other brands, such as Samsung, Dove, Saab or even YouTube! Jumping and dancing around the page mockups while collecting chocolates was meant to convey a message: the web is full of little pleasures. While the message was somewhat simplistic, the medium did its job and attracted plenty consumers.
The game provided an opportunity to engage with the brand and was integrated with Magnum’s social media presence. Completing the pleasure hunt, players could share their achievements on Facebook and Twitter, or challenge their friends to beat their best results, consequently increasing Magnum’s visibility across various social media platforms and motivating others to repeat the task.
NikeFuel
A big part of Nike+ campaign launched by Nike was NikeFuel – a tool that measured daily sports performed by users and transcribed it to points, rewarding users for heir effort and granting them a possibility of sharing their results on social media. After completing a certain amount of tasks or arriving at as specific point level, Nike would unlock additional trophies and badges that recognized player’s achievement.
In this case, gamification of sports served as a factor motivating consumers to repeat various tasks and engage with he brand. NikeFuel drove specific behaviors from its players and prompted them to continually share their achievements on social media platforms. Those tasks would be extremely difficult to engage with in the traditional marketing setting and gamification was a great strategy to simply make it happen.
The importance of content marketing is expected to rise in the future and judging by the recent applications of gamification in marketing, we’ll see more interesting games and simulations that will foreground specialized content, helping to create a more engaging relationships between brands and their customers.
The article was contributed by Monica Wells of http://www.bizdb.co.uk/.
