Ignore gamification at your peril. What many have dismissed as just one more buzzword promises to be one of the great marketing movements of the next few years.

A 2013 report by global research company Markets and Markets predicts that the overall gamification market could be worth £5.5 billion by 2018[1]. The power of gamification looks set to infiltrate – and potentially revolutionise – our every interaction, with customers, retailers and each other.

So, what is gamification?

In its simplest sense, gamification makes life fun. It takes boring things you do every day, and injects an element of entertainment, competition or creativity. Gamification strategies turn routine behaviours into engaging experiences, and in doing so boost customers’ identification with the brand, as well as offering companies a far more effective, dynamic and subtle way of engaging with their clientele.

Marketing via the power of gamification

Gamification strategies in marketing take various forms, from straightforward incentives, to more complex frameworks that seek to maximise the customer’s exposure to and engagement with the product. Some recent examples of companies that have embraced gamification include:

  • Starbucks. As long ago as 2010, the international coffee chain was collaborating with local navigation app Foursquare, offering custom badges to people who checked in at multiple locations, and giving discounts to people who became mayors (the person with the most check-ins) of any particular store – thus, taking a quotidian task that people would be doing anyway (namely, buying coffee), and instilling it with competition and incentives, effectively turning it into a game.
  • Duolingo. The company behind the popular language education app has harnessed the power of gamification to multiple ends. The platform offers free tuition in a number of languages, and makes its money from businesses who supply content for translation. Users translate content and vote on the accuracy of translations as part of their educational experience. Duolingo has successfully reframed language learning, which is often seen as a ‘chore’, turning it into a competition, with a motivational points system, and a leaderboard via which users can compare their progress with those of their friends and colleagues.

Making the power of gamification work for you

One of the underlying principles behind many gamification strategies is the idea of ‘multitasking’ – that a user experience should ideally fulfil as many purposes as possible. When devising your own gamification marketing strategies, you should not only consider what will be the most entertaining for the user, in order to maximise their exposure to and engagement with your brand, but also the ways in which gamification can be used for market research (collecting information from customers in the course of the game) and promotion (via shares and likes). You can even follow Duolingo’s lead and monetise your gamification strategy: their user activity generates a revenue stream that helps to keep the main service free.

In a survey last year, over 70% of Forbes Global 2000 companies said they planned to harness the power of gamification for marketing and customer retention. It looks like gamification is here to stay.

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[1] http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/gamification.asp