A Solid Gamification Strategy is All Your Brand Needs to Deliver Valuable Customer Experiences

Delivering highly impactful customer experiences is key to success in today’s crowded and cut-throat business landscape.

07:28 05 August 2021

Delivering highly impactful customer experiences is key to success in today’s crowded and cut-throat business landscape.  A fast-emerging trend among brands these days is to use gamification as a creative strategy for promoting new products, finding new avenues to reach and engage with customers, and brand building.

 

On the face of it, gamification might seem like a passing buzzword. It is not a novel idea and has been around in one form or the other for a long time now, but a lot of companies are just starting to see its potential and realise that it has wide ranging applications in business context, from employee training to team building to marketing.

 

For the sake of this article, let us look at how businesses can go about gamifying their strategies from a marketing standpoint.

 

Let’s first understand what this term means.  Simply put, gamification is applying simple game mechanics in areas which have no relation to gaming.  But why gaming? Gaming, in essence, appeals to the most fundamental of human desires- affirmation, reward and recognition. Brands that formulate unique and valuable experiences that play to these emotions in their customers gain a distinct advantage over their competitors.

 

Let’s take it deeper and understand how gamified strategies help businesses market their product or services? We’ll briefly go over a few real-world examples that show how renowned brands solved the gamification puzzle on their way to better customer engagement.

 

Successful brands always find a way to come up with well thought-out gamified strategies to create personal and interactive experiences that leave their customers satisfied and asking for more. These brands use gaming techniques to create new ways of spreading the word around about their products, reach their customers via new channels and interact with them in a much more effective manner, whilst keeping competitors at bay.

 

Common gaming techniques such as trivia, contests, rewards, incentives, scoring systems are used to take the brand/product to the customers, make them stick with the brand and give them a compelling reason to continue to do business with them for as long as possible.  

 

In addition to boosting customer engagement and promoting brand awareness, gamification also lets businesses collect critical customer data which they can slice, dice, and analyse on different levels to gain deeper insights into their customer behaviour.  Armed with this intelligence, businesses can create customer profiles and gear their marketing campaigns to appeal to each one of them.

 

Gamification produces excellent results if it’s presented to the right audience in the right setting. Here are a couple of examples where two brands successfully used gamifying strategies in an organic way to engage with their customers.

 

World-Renowned Cosmetics Company Forays into AR

A few years ago, L'Oréal announced itself in the Augmented Reality space in a big way. The French cosmetic giant collaborated with YouCam Makeup, an app developed by Taiwan-based Perfect Corp, so as to promote a wide range of beauty brands to viewers from different parts of the world. This AR-powered tech platform lets users browse through products, try out new cosmetics, sport new looks through digital overlays on a live selfie, get makeup suggestions and make a purchase – all from within the app.  This partnership with the virtual makeover app brought outstanding results to L'Oréal. In an era where young consumers spend a lot of time on social media sharing their clothing and makeup style, more cosmetic brands are likely to follow suit and improve their mobile presence with advanced AR capabilities to give their customers a seamless virtual experience.

 

Rolling Out New Line of Footwear, Nike-style

To generate buzz around their new line of running shoes React, Nike wanted to give their fans an unforgettable product try-out experience in store. Customers walking into their showrooms in China and other markets were treated with an interactive video game featuring pixel art graphics, Reactland. Shoppers got to become players in this real time video game modelled after the retro classics like Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario Bros. The idea is simple: players lace up their sneakers, scan their photos to create their own avatars and lead them through a challenging terrain and past the obstacles in the virtual world, while simply jogging on a real treadmill for three minutes straight holding a tiny remote that helps their avatars jump and avoid obstacles.  Once they’re done playing, they also get a 10-second video snippet of their run to share on social media. Shoppers in  stores around China, Berlin and Dubai were full of praises for Nike adding a totally new dimension to shoe shopping. Credit to Nike for stitching together an unforgettable experience for the shopper with complete personalisation and a customised shareable on top of a product trial. A lot of shoppers engaged meaningfully with this campaign and it showed in the results: nearly 50% of players ended up purchasing the trainers after their Reactland adventure. And that’s what matters.

 

As you can see, gamification when considered thoughtfully and done right can be a real win-win for everyone involved. One common thing which we think made these two campaigns successful is they added value to customers whilst bridging the gap between in-store and virtual experiences.

 

When you’re preparing a creative brief for your next campaign, think about the sort of results you’d get by gamifying it. Throw in an element of interaction into your campaign to make it a tad more compelling, personal, and engaging for the customer. If you’re on the fence about how your business can tap into this growing gamification trend and are not sure where to begin, get in touch with Appetite Creative today. One of the top creative agencies in the UK, they’re an end to end marketing company with best-in-class expertise in all key areas namely branding, design, digital and communications. They boast of an excellent track record in creating fresh brands, expanding brand footprint across digital and physical mediums, and crafting authentic brand experiences that generate loyalty and trust with their client’s customers.