How many of us would prefer to play games on our mobile or desktop instead of listening to a lecture or reading another article? We as humans have an inborn psychological need to play, and therefore we will have a natural disliking of the dull and mundane whether it be reading big chunks of text or looking at a data spreadsheet. Inevitably, humans prefer apps more intuitive with their natural behavior and feel more rewarded for investing time in it. Keeping that in mind, companies started to realize the potential of gamification in marketing to engage customers.
History of Gamification
Gamification has proven to be a dominant force in marketing over the last 100 years. First, it started in the 1930s with S&H Green Stamps. Customers could redeem stamps collected from local dealers and get a prize. Fast forward to the 1980s, The first academic papers and books began to appear. Early gamification was used in plans such as cereal toys, frequent flier miles, and even a McDonalds Monopoly game which had its share of controversy.
But if you ask modern digital marketers when gamification was born, you might get a different answer. In the recent part of the 20th century, people already knew the value of integrating game mechanics to improve productivity in the workplace, to later recognize it can further be used to engage customers.
The digital gamification is born
2002 – Nick Pelling coins the word gamification while designing a game-like user interface for electronic devices. And The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars establishes the Serious Gaming Initiative.
2005 – To boost engagement on websites Rajat Phaharia founded Bunchball. The first modernized gamification platform.. which used game mechanics. ’Microsoft’s launched Xbox 360’s Gamerscore system, standardizing in-game accomplishments.
2008 – Bret Terrill documented as applying the idiom ‘gameification’ for the first time while covering the 2008 Social Gaming summit in a blog post. Sony begins rewarding gamers on the PS3 console.
2009 – Bigdoor is founded and offers gamified customer-loyalty solutions. Also this year, an app called Foursquare was launched which enabled users to search and discover new spots and collect achievements or other badges.
2010 – Jane McGonigal made her revolutionary ted speech, Gaming Can Make a Better World, and predicted a game-based utopia.
2012 – Gartner, The Technology research firm, foretells that by 2014 “70% of Global corporations will have at least one gamified application “.
2015 – According to Gallup research, only 31% of employees are engaged with their work, and that millennials are the least performing group (28.9%).
How to weave gamification into your marketing strategy
While gamification is not yet an official tool, it can be utilized at various stages of the consumer journey without breaking the bank. A good example would be Envato Market and their badges system, encouraging service providers to maximize their goods and customer service while keeping buyers engaged with time frame achievements and amount of products bought.
First, you need to define your objectives – is it traffic? Engagement? Then you want to know what works for your audience, grasping what they desire will help come up with a gamification plan to weave in your overall marketing strategy. Also, you need to ease it up; grand plans often go wrong. Start with simple games or quizzes to see if your audience is responsive to them experimenting is the way to go for starters.
Remember, gamification is supposed to be fun! We want our customers to spend more time on our website, app or for marketers who need to seal the deal for their product or service. to do so, we need to give them a sense of improvement at getting better at something and reward them.