‘Gamification’ – anyone working in online marketing in the last few years will have heard the term. Often touted as “the solution to all Gaming company woes”, but what is it?
At the heart of the ‘Gamification Puzzle’ lies the consolidation of disparate data sets that gaming operators generate. Effective use of this masses of data to inform your promotional, CRM and marketing efforts.
Throughout this post and subsequent posts, we’ll discuss the topic in more detail, including relevant practical examples how of CompetitionLabs can power your efforts to unlock the true potential of your player data to create an engaging experience that both complement and expand your promotional capabilities.
What is this thing we call ‘Gamification’?
Finding some consensus can be tricky. The dictionary definition is:
Finding some sort of consensus can be tricky. The dictionary definition is:
The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service
A broad definition, and one that doesn’t highlight the two primary considerations you need to plan for or the levels of detail beneath them.
The Gamification: involving promotional mechanics/competitions, scoring strategies and rulesets that power the players’ experience and can delight and surprise them.
The Player Experience: involving the visualisation of the product or task to the customer or player interacts with on your brand
Gamification will use customer, product data (in-game or rich events) to create a promotional mechanic that addresses a specific commercial opportunity or creates an engaging player experience.
On the other end, ‘The player experience’ can be thought of as the unique brand experience you offer to your customer. It would be best if you were striving to handhold the customer through the task, ensuring that the ask is clear, easy to understand, and where the customer can view their progress at any time and, ideally, in real-time.
While frequently utilised together to create compelling experiences, they can be used to significant effect independently of each other as well.
Done right, Gamification is adding an extra level of enjoyment and engagement to the product or brand experience by applying an engagement element, single & multi-layered promotional mechanics or scoring strategies and displaying a front-end experience that complements the underlying activity in a fun and innovative way.
In the next post we will discuss unifying your product and player data into one point of action and control – the first part of the puzzle – and how CompetitionLabs opens new promotional opportunities to support both acquisition onboarding and existing customer retention.