How Gamification Tactics Win
https://www.lovegunn.co/news/how-gamification-tactics-win/
Gamification in the brandscape
Gamification is proving to be more than a buzzword for forward-thinking brands. This guide explores how brands can foster their community, encourage participation, and prolong user engagement through gamification. LoveGunn have collated the best brand examples, recommendations, predictions, and insight from the experts.
Whether you’re well-versed in the world of gamification or keen to learn more about the buzzword, this guide highlights the efficacy and potential of gamification for the brands of tomorrow.
What do we mean by ‘Gamification’?
When we refer to gamification in this article, we’re talking about the application of gaming techniques to non-gaming contexts. We’ll be focusing on the process of incentivizing people’s engagement and activities to drive positive results with game-like mechanics. And by results, we mean building brand love (and your bottom line).
Are you being played?
When it comes to effective gamification, subtlety is key. Some of the best examples are those we don’t recognise as gamification — even though we interact with them on a daily basis.
Do these sound familiar?
- Happy hours
- AMEX
- Apple Smartwatch
- Dating apps
Level up: How can gamification tactics help my brand grow?
Disclaimer: you don’t need to create a ‘gaming’ experience. Instead, the integration of subtle gamification mechanics into your user experience can win over your audience by doing three things:
- Fostering community
- Encouraging participation
- Prolonging engagement
Good Gamification doesn’t start with games
Gamification is about participation, and it speaks to the 8 core drivers and motivators of human behaviour.
Each case study explores how the following drives impact the user experience as per Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis framework:
- Epic meaning
- Accomplishment
- Empowerment
- Ownership
- Social influence
- Scarcity
- Unpredictability
- Avoidance
Fostering community: STRAVA
The Strava app is a gamification success story. It’s even been dubbed a ‘religion’ (The Guardian) — and there’s nothing that bonds people together quite like shared belief. A sense of collaborative community and healthy competition is what keeps Strava users hooked; where anyone and everyone can feel part of a global digital team.
- Epic Meaning & Calling → Altruism, community collaboration, and competition
- Development & Accomplishment → Intrinsic competition, progression, and points
- Social Influence & Relatedness → Self-Expression, extrinsic rewards, status, and virality
- Loss & Avoidance → Urgency & behavioural momentum
Why does it work?
- “If it isn’t on Strava, did it really happen?” Gamified techniques create FOMO and challenge users to prove themselves on paper.
- The power of community is a key motivator, and motivation is the essence of the sporting world.
How can my brand adopt gamification mechanics to foster a community?
- Make sharing easy and rewardable to encourage virality and status — status doesn’t exist without community validation.
- Encourage interaction and transparency amongst your user base.
Pete Jenkins: International Gamification Consultant & Lecturer
What is the most valuable gamification technique that many brands could implement?
“Though it depends upon the brand’s particular audience I recommend any game elements (like an escape room where the players have to work together to solve the clues and escape before the time limit) that encourage customers to collaborate or sometimes compete with each other. Not necessarily that easy to implement but it is very powerful when we can build social connections with each other.”
How do you see brand gamification evolving in 2022?
“Gamification is being applied more to long term loyalty of customers, and not just to quickfire marketing campaigns, in 2022. A key approach to this is by using gamification to build personalised experiences between customers and the brand. The brand is then more front of mind when the next buying decision needs to be taken. Not to mention that our customers can then tell stories about these experiences to their friends and family.”
Encouraging participation: WAZE
Waze’s Gamification tactics centre around a positive participation cycle: the more you participate, the better your user experience. With crowd-sourced traffic information, Waze’s users are incentivised to contribute towards the common goal of better journeys.
- Epic Meaning & Calling → Altruism, purpose, users can drive a different route to ease congestion
- Social Influence & Relatedness → Status, upgrade your avatar by collecting points
- Unpredictability & Curiosity → Anticipation, points, and achievements
- Development & Accomplishment → Progression & digital rewards
Why does it work?
- People are drawn to completing challenging tasks, as it creates a sense of achievement.
- The more users acknowledge the progress they’re making (in their journey and on the app), the more motivated they’ll become.
How can my brand adopt gamification mechanics to foster a community?
- Set challenges to give the user control of their goals and reward value.
- Don’t pit your users against each other; encourage them to work collaboratively.
Ruairidh Roberts: UK Country Manager @ Waze
What is the most valuable gamification technique that many brands could implement?
“The success many global brands have had with gamification explains why the technique has become a buzzword in the industry of late. But the true value of this approach lies in its ability to foster and grow a strong user community dedicated to supporting your business.
As the name suggests, the general idea behind gamification involves taking techniques and elements you’d find in nearly every traditional video game — such as rewards systems, challenges, and a sense of competition — and applying that to your product or service. Where this works best is when it’s combined with user personalisation. We’ve seen this done by many household names across numerous industries, but Waze truly pioneered navigation gamification, which is how we were able to build Waze maps.
In the very beginning, we encouraged users to drive to places that weren’t on our maps to earn cookies or points, and literally map out Waze. Now, our map editors can accumulate points as they make legitimate edits and ‘level up’ the map editor rankings. Therein lies the most valuable gamification technique: the realization that we’re all on multiplayer mode!”
How do you see brand gamification evolving in 2022?
“Many brands delving into gamification have previously focused on the single player experience, providing new features to encourage customers to interact more with the brand or product itself. However, now businesses need to lean into that sense of community and focus more on encouraging greater interaction between users. The friendly competition and mutual support provided will help foster that sense of loyalty to the brand, while at the same time, offers the company an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to its users.”
Prolonging engagement: HEADSPACE
Gamification and the mental health space might seem like an unlikely duo. But the elements that Headspace incorporated into their app made a serious subject playful and helped enable intrinsic motivation to create long-term change.
- Loss & Avoidance → Maintain mindfulness streak & app notifications
- Development & Accomplishment → User statistics, milestones, and progression
- Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback → Behavioral momentum & reward schedules
- Social Influence & Relatedness → Virality and quick share options from the bespoke dashboard
Why does it work?
- Users are rewarded for repeated engagement > dopamine hit > increased rate of return.
- It makes use of ’emergent‘ storytelling narratives, where the user’s choices matter. By exploring and discovering new territories, they build a story that reflects their sense of self.
- It creates a ‘playground’ space where users can roam, explore, engage and set goals over time.
How can my brand adopt gamification mechanics to foster a community?
- Reach your users through bespoke messaging and notifications.
- Let users build a story they can identify with, and encourage them to regularly reflect on their experience.
Rob Alvarez Bucholska: Gamification expert & Founder of the Professor Game podcast
What is the most valuable gamification technique that many brands could implement?
“When considering which gamification techniques to implement, brands should take a hard look at their objectives, their players or target players, do some creative back and forth, and from that pick the idea that stands out. This should include the best strategies and mechanics for that particular case. I’ve always said that gamification is a design discipline, and as in most instances of design, there is never a ‘onesize-fits-all.’”
How do you see brand gamification evolving in 2022?
“Gamification is silently becoming more and more mainstream. We are all the time witnessing new approaches and applications, some by people who are into gamification (and many doing a fantastic job) and others where it is not explicit, but even further it was not even necessarily conceived as a gamification application from the start.
Many of the examples we’ve referred to for years in the gamification industry are people and companies that have used strategies derived from games in subtle ways and quite often not even thinking about it as gamification. I’m not sure there will be a broader explicit field of gamification in the future, but the lessons and opportunities it opens I am convinced that they will continue to grow more and more since it works when we do it well.”
Why gamification will help you beat the competition
Unlocking new opportunities to connect with your audience
As the brandscape strives to add genuine value to its audience’s lives, consumer participation is key. But it takes more than getting involved in the experience to really unlock brand growth. Moving forward, brands must strive for ‘brand value co-creation’, where consumers are involved in promoting, advocating, collaborating and sharing knowledge with the business.
“Gamification as a platform for brand co-creation experiences”. Nobre H.
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