Gamification Marketing For Dummies. Zarrar Chishti

is involved, too (in a much smaller role). If you’d like strategy to be a part of your game, be sure to incorporate a challenge for your audience so they can explore or manage their environment.

       Investment: The goal here is to get your audience to invest their time and emotions into your game. If you achieve this goal, they’ll value your campaign. This game type typically involves more development at the design stage to ensure there is enough to engage your audience for the long term. Ultimately, you want your game to get them racing back to your campaign to ensure their progress is maintained.

       Consequences: If you include this element in your classic game type, there will be a consequence for every one of your audience’s actions. Each significant action (or nonaction) should result in a visual consequence, such as rewards, badges, or points.

       Progress and feedback: I cover this element in the coming chapters, where I discuss the importance of giving your audience some sort of measure of progress and feedback as they progress in your game.

       Tutorials: The last thing you want is for your gamification campaign to leave your audience feeling helpless. To alleviate this problem, you can include a visual tutorial, as well as help sections at each major part of your campaign. This way, your audience will know how everything works right at the start and throughout the campaign.

       Achievements: As opposed to progress and feedback, where the audience can see a positive progression, here the fear of losing points and achievements can be a powerful motivator. With gamification marketing, getting your audience to your campaign is the easy part. Getting them to return and value their status in your campaign can only be done through regular, meaningful achievements.

       Storyline: In a classic game type, you may want to consider adding a storyline in the form of a narrative or a theme. This strategy can help your audience be more engaged.The storyline may be linked with some existing narrative associated with your company or industry. It could be anything from your company values to topical industry themes. Whatever you decide on, make sure your audience will be able to understand and make sense of it. Otherwise, they’ll feel an immediate disconnect with your campaign.

       Time: Including time pressure in your classic game type can help create a sense of urgency with your campaign. Reducing the amount of time your audience has to complete tasks can focus them on your campaign. You can increase engagement through increased time pressure, too.For instance, by default, you can give them 15 minutes to solve a particular task, which is plenty of time. However, whenever the audience makes a mistake, not only are they penalized with lack of achievements, but their time remaining is also reduced. This increase in time pressure adds an interesting tension to the classic game type. The idea is that your audience will remain engaged because they’ll want to solve the task faster.

       Rarity: There should always be levels of rarity to the achievements you offer in a classic game type. Making something rare can make it all the more desirable. For instance, if you’re offering colored badges, there should be a badge that is very much coveted but extremely rare to achieve.

      Enterprising

      You should incorporate at least one enterprising game type element in your campaign. The enterprising game type is all about points and status. It creates the type of engagement where your audience will want to show their friends how they’re progressing (for example, through badges).

      An example of an enterprising game type is British Airways Avios air-mile program, where every additional mile collected is an achievement in its own right. Flyers can gain points by purchasing tickets, shopping at one of British Airways’ partner sites, and using an American Express credit card. However, British Airways also awards badges for purchasing a certain number of flights every year. These badges give flyers privileged access to lounges across the world, among other benefits. Flyers then have to ensure they complete the journeys every year to maintain their badge status.

      There is a good chance that your audience will respond favorably to the enterprising game type: someone who boasts they have a higher status or achievement than their friend did.

      Here are some elements of the enterprising game type (not every enterprising game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):

       Levels or progression: In an enterprising type game, giving your audience a chance to work their way up levels (such as status levels) and goals can help them to visually map their progression through your campaign. Employing levels will ensure that your audience remains loyal to your campaign and company.

       Learning new skills: The idea here is to give your audience an opportunity to learn something new about your company, products, services, or industry. Gamification can be a very effective way to achieve this goal in a marketing campaign. For instance, if you want to highlight the fact that your company uses a unique method or ingredient, make sure this lesson is learned during people’s engagement with your campaign.

       Symbolic rewards: Symbolic rewards are different from general rewards like badges. Symbolic rewards are a physical symbol of achievement, such as a free coffee or a free companion ticket on someone’s next purchase. Make sure they carry meaning and status and are useful to the campaign.

       Challenges: In an enterprising game type, you want to challenge the audience. Don’t be afraid to create challenges. In fact, look to incorporate them in increasing levels. Challenges help keep your audience interested and engaged, especially after the initial phase. Look to test your audience’s knowledge and give them an opportunity to apply it. Overcoming challenges will make your audience feel like they’ve earned their achievements.

      Disrupting

      Elements of the disrupting game type help create a gamification marketing campaign that displaces the existing marketing trends and eventually replaces them. Disruptive campaigns are generally more entrepreneurial in design and outside the norm in functionality.

      

Try to identify gaps in your industry’s current campaigns that fail to see how the marketing trends are evolving. With a game-changing element, you can create a disruptive campaign that will allow your company to stay ahead of the rest. Plus, your audience will welcome a disruption to the current marketing campaigns being thrown at them.

      Here are some elements of the disrupting game type (not every disrupting game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):

       Creativity tools: Give back control to your audience. For instance, allow them to create their own content and express themselves. There could be a number of reasons to do this, outside of your campaign, including for personal gain, for pleasure, or to help other people.An example of this element of a disrupting type of game is the popular ElfYourself gamification campaign from Office Depot/OfficeMax. ElfYourself is a native app (available for download from the mobile app stores) that allows users to upload photos of their friends and family from Facebook or their mobile phones. Then users select a dance, and the app creates a custom video that users can share to social media.

       Innovation: Giving your audience a way to think outside the box and outside the boundaries of your campaign is a great element of a disrupting type of game. This approach allows them to channel innovation and helps you understand what your audience wants and expects from your company and industry. For instance, you could allow your audience to develop a system that creates the results they would like to see. You can then use this data to see if your company is currently producing these results for your customers.

       Chaos: I get funny looks from clients when I suggest chaos as a gamification element. But in games, chaos is symbolic. It’s a core element that keeps the player immersed and engaged. For your disrupting type of game, it’s not about burning your company’s image to the ground. Instead, think of this chaos element as throwing out the rulebook for your campaign. For instance, in your gamification model, consider running “no rules” events.