Gamification–the use of game elements to promote desired behaviors among customers and employees-does work, and it will be the subject of the Luncheon Keynote at SIPA’s Winter Marketing Conference, Dec. 11-13 in Las Vegas. Joel Rothstein, senior director, eCommerce Platform & Rapid Products Group, Marriott International, will give the talk. Marriott has developed a new gaming app to attract the brand loyalty of millennials.
But gamification’s popularity as a marketing strategy extends far past millennials. Many of us enjoy a good puzzle or contest or entertaining way of doing something not always fun. For instance, Andy Swindler, president of SIPA member Astek (and a speaker in Thursday’s webinar on mobile), wrote last year about a site called Chore Wars that “lets you create a ‘party’ and adventures’ (or chores) for everything that needs to be done around the house.” Access Intelligence’s “min” website poses various fun quizzes and contests to build audience engagement. Even dating sites will now have you pick between two people like a dance contest instead of presenting just one profile at a time to review.
FourSquare got to where they are today because of gamification, although they decided this year to move away from it. But Gamification Corp. blogger Ivan Kuo explains, “Gamification isn’t any service’s endgame; it’s a design construct to engage users further.” There’s that key word for us—engage.
In his very popular Coursera session on gamification, Wharton professor Kevin Werbach lays out a six-step framework:
1. Define business objectives. Why gamify? How do you hope to benefit your business, or achieve some other goal such as motivating people to change their behavior?
2. Delineate target behaviors. What do you want your players to do? And what are the metrics that will allow you to measure them? These behaviors should promote your business objectives, although the relationship may be indirect.
3. Describe your players. Who do you want participating in your activity? Are they prospective customers, employees at your organization, or some other community?
4. Devise your activity loops. Explore in greater detail how you will motivate your players using engagement and progression loops.
5. Don’t forget the fun. This is why it works in the first place. Identify which aspects of the game could continue to motivate players to participate even without rewards.
6. Deploy the appropriate tools. Explain in detail what your system would look like. What are some of the game elements involved and what will the experience be like for the players?
Here are three other recent examples of gamification from the Gamification Corp. website:
- “NASA’s solution is an app called CloudSpotter, created by the Cloud Appreciation Society. Users take pictures of the sky, which are tagged by the phone’s GPS system, and then answer a number of questions about the clouds to determine what type they’re looking at….The combination of crowd-sourcing and gamification makes for a powerful asset for any organization, whether science or business-oriented.”
- Duolingo is a new learning tool that uses gamification to teach and reinforce language learning. It awards points for completing vocabulary exercises and keeps track of the learner’s progress through line scales and level badges along the way.
- There’s even a new app called PromiseUP that gamifies the promises you make so that you keep them. “By serving as a virtual feedback system, PromiseUP helps users keep track on their progress while enabling themselves to be accountable for their actions and promises.”
Las Vegas should be the perfect venue for Marketing Conference attendees to discuss gamification. Rothstein will give us an inside look at what makes Marriott’s programs successful, and I’m sure others will share their experiences as well. It really doesn’t take much to start using gamification. And if you do it well enough, there’s always Gammify, the 2014 Gamification World Championships!
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline
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Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team at