Marketing is a broad discipline in which there are many different concepts that can be applied for a successful strategy. There is not either a correct or a wrong idea, depending on your value proposition and how you want to build your brand image, some will work out better than the rest.
Gamification is a concept that in marketing represents the addition of playing ideas into the campaigns in order to create customer engagement to the brand. However, the brands need to adopt the following five rules to maximize their chances of success in gamificating some aspects of their marketing campaigns.
1.Know the pitfalls: the marketing scene is full of meaningless campaigns that disappear instantly. The gaming element itself needs to be different without the product and the brand, it needs to mark some difference. For example, in the EA Sports game FIFA, it would give more authenticity to the game to add some branded stadia perimeter, but it would not change the actual gameplay experience. A brand needs to understand the benefits for themselves and for the participants, otherwise, the chance of only providing an experience similar to a simple retail promo.
2.Look before you leap: brands have been really successful understanding the relationship between people and brands. But there is still the need to fully understand how and why people play, how games fulfill fundamental human needs, and where the sweet spots are for brands. All of these areas need to be audited in order to gain more knowledge and create better strategies.
“Success in gamification lies in finding and exploring a brand´s sweet spot in the overlap between people, play and products."
3.Understand play basics: it can be found clusters of behaviors and emotions associated with different kinds of play. Although, it can vary across cultures, there are different basic commonalities like the need to explore, copy, learn and adapt to environments. To create emotional bonds you need to do stuff with and for people. This kind of bond is a by-product of what you do, through playing and involving your users, you can unlock emotion.
“ Tell me and I will forget, involve me and I will feel"
4.Understand brand roles: for a brand it is not enough to just provide content and ask people to sacrifice some of their attention in return. A brand needs to be a tool to facilitate and augment the needs fulfillment that games represent.
5. Map people differences: there are different types of play, people approach games in different ways and therefore different behaviors. According to a study by Richard Bartle, there are 4 types of personalities: explorers, achievers, socialisers and killers. It is a way to know what kind of consumer in what market will respond to what kind of gaming approach.
There are many companies that are awarded for their creative efforts and making commercials that go beyond advertising the brand. The following videos are from companies that created an story around their product to engage in some way the consumer.
5-Hour Energy's "2:30 Horror"
On this video released by the energy drink brand 5-Hour Energy, it is approached a common issue that every working person has. Once the clock hits around 2:30 p.m. your brain starts shutting down and you start feeling sleepy. This brand adressed this problem in a creative way by picturing sleepy people as zombies and the only one that took 5-Hour Energy is the worker that is still awake. Really inventive way to connect with the audience.
Samsung
Samsung at any moment displays in an explicit way some of their devices, but what they do is to relate themselves with the creation of an album with Jay Z. More than a simple video, it is narrated as a story where Jay Z expresses what he wants to create. It is all about art, the ability to create something sonorous. In this way Samsung can provide an artistic brand image.
GoPro, "Fireman Saves Kitten"
In this incredible video Go Pro go to the heart of people. They connect emotionally through this video where a firefighter keeps alive a cat that was about to pass away. The clip was recorder by the firefighter himself with a Go Pro camera attached to his helmet. It is an heroic act recorded through a camera whose brand´s slogan is "BE A HERO".
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