Let's play! How gamification can be used in marketing campaigns

We’re seeing the term ‘gamification’ being used a lot more in marketing these days. It’s the application of traditional gaming methods in non-context environments - and it’s everywhere!

In this episode, we invited Pete Jenkins to chat about all things gamification. Pete is the international authority on gamification. He's a lifelong gamer, successful entrepreneur, a lecturer and CEO of Gamification+. He mentors and trains companies worldwide on the use of gamification to solve business challenges. 

We discuss how you can use gamification in your marketing campaigns, how it can help build brand awareness and how you can kick off your very own gamification project. We’ll also hear Pete’s predictions for gamification in 2022.


Interviewer: Amy Burchill 

Guest speaker: Pete Jenkins from Gamifiction+ 

Podcast produced by Let’s Talk Video Production

Transcript

Hello and a Happy New Year. Welcome to the Big Bright Podcast. This is the podcast we talk about marketing, tech, company, culture and everything in between. I'm Amy, the marketing executive at Bright and today we are talking all about gamification. If you are not familiar with the term, gamification is the application of traditional gaming methods in non context environments, like marketing. Joining me today is Pete Jenkins. He is the international authority on gamification. He's a lifelong gamer, successful entrepreneur, a lecturer and CEO of gamification + ltd. He mentors and trains companies worldwide on the use of gamification to solve business challenges. In today's episode, we're talking about how you can use gamification in your marketing campaigns, how it can help build brand awareness and how you can kick off your very own gamification project. So welcome, Pete.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you. You're our first guest of 2022 as well. So yes, very exciting to have you here.You are the true expert on the subject. So I apologise for my rather basic explanation in the intro. But if we could start with your definition of gamification?

Well, yours was close to the most commonly used one in academia and in the industry, but I quite like one from Kevin Webber, which is that: gamification is the process of making activities more game - like. That's a bit more of an instruction.

What excites you about gamification? And where did it all start for you?

Now, for me, I was running an IT company, originally. Customer Relationship Management databases, things like that. Big complicated bits of software, that users didn't necessarily use that much, or didn't use all the features and get to know it. And if you want someone to stay a customer for the long term of something like that, they need to be using it and benefiting from it. And bigger customers would do things like pay for regular training of their staff, and that keeps things fresh in the mind. But for those people without a budget, or a much lower budget, what do you do?

And so I started looking for better UX design, user experience design. And I saw this word gamification. I thought, 'I like games, what's this?' And I typed it in, did an online course and within a few weeks, I realised that was the answer. Or if it wasn't the answer, nothing was and quickly sort of started using a gamified CRM I found within the business and found that it really helped staff adopt and use the features. That's the Holy Grail, isn't it? When you're a business owner, you pay for something you want people to actually use it. And it was quite simple gamification, in that first version. It was literally like game mechanics being used to encourage people to explore the software. To use it regularly, and I call it the exploring bits, because you could only complete certain collections in it, if you've done all the things in a particular area. So say, for instance, in the marketing area of the CRM, you would have to add a new contact or prospect. Search for one to report on them, do a follow-up and just use more and more of the features. And you couldn't complete the clicks until you've done it. And of course, the more you've done those things, the more likely you are to use them again, in the future.

Is this particular CRM still being used today? Are you able to talk about what it was?

Yeah, it used to be called Zurmo. It was open source. It got taken over. And now it's a system called CRM.me. Luckily, it's still used by various customers, I support. Although it's not the main thing we do as a consultancy anymore, it still excites me, because it's what got me into this. So we support companies like the Brighton Chamber of Commerce use it and some others.

What other elements are there that in that software that are gamified?

That was quite simple, okay. It really is a standard featured CRM system, and the gamification features encourage people when they start using it, to onboard into it. And actually, as you use it more, the game features disappear. And that's actually one of the good examples that you should look for in gamification. Having succeeded in training you in a new habit or behaviour, you no longer need the training wheels of the game, potentially because what you do find in any gamification, or game, is you're putting extra obstacles in people's way. For instance, in the CRM, you're potentially making them do an extra click or two in order to engage with the game mechanics as well as do their job. So that's good in the beginning, because it's engaging them and making them actually complete the stuff and learn it. But eventually, it's just going to get in the way, you know The first customer, I had to ask me to turn off the gamification features was a workaholic, who was using it so much every day, he'd worked out it was save him a good six minutes a day to turn it off. But he didn't need to be gamified. He was already using it to its full.

So would you say that gamification is mostly used to teach people?

it generally starts off with a bit of teaching people and then it gets more engaging, more advanced But I would say the best games, and gamification always boils down to something based around a skill that people can get better at. And that doesn't matter whether it's a customer, a user, anyone. What's most motivating is to get better at something.

So I'd love to talk about gamification in the context of brand awareness and building brand experiences. Should we dig into that a little bit more?

Yeah, there's quite a lot to that. We could start by saying what doesn't really work anymore. What we're starting to see is typical loyalty programmes, for instance, have trouble actually maintaining loyalty. The thing that they set out to do. Most loyalty programmes have points or something like that. But it's not really enough. There's a number of reasons.

One - is people are used to them. So when I'm running a workshop, and I ask people in the audience what loyalty cards they have, they don't just have one, they've got one for each of the chains that they're working with or shopping at. And that tends to mean that they're not really loyal, which kind of defeats the point. So what we've been looking at, and the bit, the challenge I like is how do you actually maintain loyalty over the long term, not just in the next transaction? And a lot of what we see working now is about building brand experiences with a customer, not even necessarily a transactional one. But something that reminds the customer of the brand at a particular point, so that the brand is front of mind when the important purchasing decision actually happens. And that's where gamification can be really useful.
 Because what we're talking about is actually building engaging experiences with the brands help, and the customer taking part. Sounds simple like that.

Yeah, it certainly does. We're talking about marketing, and using gamification in marketing, could you give us some thoughts on how this works, or some examples that you've seen in the real world?

Okay, I'll start with a real-world example that I quite like, not one of mine, but I do use it. when I'm teaching my students. This was for Nike. They launched a shoe called React. And they did this thing with some pop-up shops around the place. So they generally have a po-up shop near a sports stadium, and you would wander by and think what's going on in there, it's very brightly coloured, something's happening, as usual, should attract some attention. And in the pop-up shop, they had a treadmill with some screens, and a little clicker, basically, and what you would do is put on the shoes, run on the treadmill, and that would power your character through a game, a platform game. And every time you click the clicker, you would jump over an obstacle. So basically, you're powering it with your run, and you're jumping over an obstacle. You're engaging with the brand, because you're wearing the shoes, and it will record 10 or 15 seconds of your gameplay and give that to you so you can share it on social media, etc. So it's good for viral marketing, amongst other things.

But basically, you've got a little brand story between you and the customer, or potential customer, in this case where I have played something with your brand enjoyed myself, probably and 48% of the people who played bought the shoes as well Even if they didn't buy the shoes, they've got a positive brand story to tell. And what you find is if they've bought those shoes, as a result of that, they'll be wearing them and they'll be telling other people about those shoes, and the story behind them.

I think where we are in Brighton, if you wonder about and you ask people on the street questions about items of their clothing, they nearly always have a story behind one of them. Now, I got this in this country, or this is a gift from someone. People like to wear, not just wear but own things that have stories behind them. They're the ones they tend to keep the ones that sentimental. And what we can do is enhance that with a game.

Such a good example. If we talk about sort of non retail brands, talk about b2b. Have you seen examples in that area where it works really well?

A few sprang to mind locally, there's quite a fun one, which is a series of expos, tthat are lal built around games  So they'll stheme ach one. So you might have a football themed one or something like that. But within the expo, there are various elements to match that .tTere might be a physical bit .I vaguely remember going to one there was a goal etup. And you had to kick the ball in and win some products from some of the brands exhibiting , o stuff you can complete by going around and visiting all the stance within the theme. And just more and more immersion, basically into that theme, making it more engaging. I also remember in the health space, British Heart Foundation, someone I was working with, they built but think about like a version of operation that you could play on the stand, and you would learn about the elements of hearts that go wrong. And it was quite challenging. It was very skill based. So it was easy to get it wrong, and learn about it and get better at it and enjoy the experience. And you'll go away remembering that and tin heir case, you're more likely to donate later.
So yeah, so I guess that was the ultimate goal for them. At the end. Would you say that gamification becomes more challenging depending on the industry? Or do you think it's something that can be spread across no matter what industry you're in, do you think you can make it work?

I think there's a simple way to look at it, which is if you're trying to change a human behaviour. I you create more of a behaviour or less of one, then it's probably possible to look at it from a gamification point of view. So it's not really going to work on robots, because it's about human motivation. So for instance, I work with water companies on getting people to use less water. So less of a behaviour. Generally with marketing, it's about more behaviour, like buy more product, or come back regularly.

And what is it about games that is the motivating for us? Is it because of that like reward at the end of it? Is it the process of actually playing the game? Is it the points you stack up? What is it psychologically do you think that really appeals to people?

I think it's that would play. We all learn originally when we're born as a child through play What we're doing with games and gamification is just allowing play to happen or unlocking it, you know, after it's been drummed out of you for a few years. You can unlock it again and make people really excited. It's not like we're having to get people to do it for the first time. It's innate. And all that's happened with gamification is that people saw how successful the games industry is getting players to engage for hundreds of hours per month, potentially. And we're just working out what works really well. There's a lot of science behind it now about which game elements in what combinations for which sort of audience work well, and engage. And really, what I like about gamification is, if it's going to work for the long term, it's got to be for the benefit of the player. So it's naturally ethical if it's done well.

I guess the player in this context would be the audience member, the buyer, the customer, I suppose?

Absolutely. Yeah, think of it as a customer journey, or a player journey, or a user journey, whatever it is, the person you're impacting is the player. Quite often, you need to think about two elements of it as well. There's not just the customer, there might be some other element of the experience. And we have to gamify, the customer representative as well, to be part of it, and to build that experience. And I think that's one of the fun bits with what I do is not just think about the customer, but also the other people or pieces of the puzzle that engage with that person to make it a good experience.

So if you thought about the exhibition stand, you want the customer to play, but what's in it for the people on the stand? how do they become part of the game? I saw a really good one once, which was people playing, but the audience could also engage, they could hit buttons to make it harder for one player, or easier for the other. What I like about that example, is that there's an issue with exhibition stnads is that you only get so many people at them and engaging with whatever device or game you've got at a time. Whereas you might have 30 or 40 people or more nearby. So if you can find a way for them to engage either just by watching or even better to be interacting with the players, then you've reached a bigger audience at the same time, and you've given them the ultimate experience, if possible, is not just playing the game, but playing it with other people and building connections with other people. And then we've really powered up our gamification engagement moment.

Have you seen any examples in the digital space like on websites and stuff like that, where gamification has worked really well, or any clients you've worked with to help them improve the digital experience of their brand?

Normally we end up working with apps. So those will be the first examples that come to mind. But there was a good website one quite a few years back, by Magnum ice creams. What I liked about it was you had to complete a set of challenges with a character playing in the browser to win points vouchers, free ice cream, but they did it with a load of other brands, too. You could hop to another brand website and play a level of the game there as well. So they worked with other brands. I really like that because it was it was thinking big, even 10-15 years ago about what's possible. There's some good other stuff out there actually. Coke did some stuff in Hong Kong, where with the app on your phone, when you watch a certain advert on TV, you could shake the app, and it would pick up and give you extra discounts or vouchers. So you're actually engaging and interacting with the advert which was fun.

Yeah, Google do a lot, don't they, they do a lot of like games on their homepage. And they did one for the Tokyo Olympics. Last year, they had a whole like an immersive game that you can go in and you could like race and do different challenges, building awareness around the Olympics, which I thought was really cool. That's one example that pops to mind.

An example of it in use for a real B2B type company was for a bank in - I'm going to say - UAE. Within the banking app, the programme was called Shaken and Save. So you'd set some parameters about, you know, how you can automatically save some money each month, it's not very exciting, you know, or like rounding up figures. But in this instance, you would set like a minimum or maximum amount you might like to save at any one moment, say, between a pound and £100 or £1000, iy didn't really matter, it was up to you. But it would encourage you to shake and save. And as you shook it, it would randomly choose one of those fingers and save it. So usually, it just transferred 90 quid to my savings account. But you've got this random reward element and you're engaging in it. It's not just automatic. It's much more of a little brand experience happening right there.

And that's more interesting, and probably more motivating when someone else can let the app like choose how much you save. Rather than you having to go, I don't know, £90, it just does it for you. Have you seen any instances where gamification hasn't been as successful?

So there's loads actually. The thing I see most though, is that gamified tends to work for a few weeks because it's novel, and everyone likes something new and novel. So it does tend to work quite well for short-term marketing campaigns. And it'll always be pretty successful. But the longer it has to run on for, the more likely you'll see it fail. It might just tail off, but it might actually have an opposite effect at some point. If you keep it going for too long, without enough engagement features, enough game mechanics for the longer term. So a good example is quizzes. Quite often people do a quiz to engage with their customers, and you might have it open for a while to engage with people. What you find is people like to quiz intensively, but only for a short period of time. So you might want to cut it off after a week rather than just leave it open. Because what you'll find is if you've cut it off after a week, is people think 'Oh, excellent. That was fun. When's the next one?' If you just leave it open, basically uses just tails off, and it's just died away. And all you had to do was make it scarce and cut it off after a certain period of time. And then people want more later, but they can't maintain the momentum. That's what happens with quizzes. You get really into it, you're learning a subject or about a product. And then you're like, Oh, I'm done with that now.

Yeah, scarcity is often key.

It can be. There was a great example with Santander Bank in Poland for counter staff. They had a game, think a bit like The Sims, you could build and develop your village, you competed against other branches. And you could play for a bit longer and get more things to play with if you hit your key performance indicators. If you sold more. But what they did was they limited the gameplay to 10 minutes every other day, mainly because they didn't want to take people away from the counter and serving people. And I think you could get an extra five minutes of play if you hit your KPIs. But what the scarcity did was made people really want to play, it just never tailed away, they played for a whole year, and it reached 98% of all counter staff being involved. And we're talking like average age 44 to 48, something like that. 90% female, it was not what you'd call the typical target audience for gamification, particularly like a Sims-type game.

I love that. I love the Sims as well. So if they could make that a regular thing, that'd be amazing. So if anyone is interested in kicking off a project or investing in gamification, what resources would they need? Whereabouts should they start?

Obviously, they could just reach out straight to me and spend lots of money. No, the secret to it really is to play some games. To play a broad range. So like choose some games you wouldn't normally play the types you wouldn't, because then you'll get a better understanding of what your target audience might play. And then try and just build something fun, but something very small. Gamify ne aspect of an event. I always like to get my new members of staff to gamify their business card, so they all have to think of something different. One person created a scratch card. So if you wanted the phone number or the email address, you have to scratch it off. A simple bit of engagement. Another one of my staff had a in essence, a version of snakes and ladders on the back of the business card. And he had to take a dice with him. If you rolled a particular number, you would land on connect on LinkedIn. Or refer a friend.

You've mentioned people going to just go and play some games. What are your favourite types of games?

I like strategy games where I get to take over the world. I'm a bit of a fan of that. And my one of my favourite games originally was a game called Civilization. On my phone, I'll play a Battle for Pollatopia, which is like a mini version of that that's just really fun, engaging and aesthetically pleasing. But now and then I'll play a Candy Crush equivalent sort of match-three game, which can be quite relaxing. I don't really have time for the more social games where you play with other people on that's more because I have to try and fit it into my lifestyle.

And you often need a really good internet connection, which is often my problem with those games. When people want to start their own project, is there anything they should avoid?

Avoid points, badges and leaderboards. Not because they're necessarily bad, but they lead to bad habits in the game design, they're probably the three easiest things to build. But for instance, people will often soon as they start using points in a game, they'll think about adding a leaderboard because you've already got the points. Now leaderboards only work in certain situations. And they can be deemed motivational in some because there's only ever one person at the top of a leaderboard, for instance. So is everyone else that happy to be at the bottom, not the top? The other top tip is never start with a game in mind. And this happens a lot. I think one of my very first clients, they came to me, and they said, look, the chairman really wants us to have a golf-based game, right? For an employee benefits learning game, you could have shoe-horned something in but it was never going to really work. So you have to go through a process of understanding what the players are like, what do they like? What did they want? And Golf was not the answer.

I'm trying to think  how you could incorporate that in. It sounds a bit complicated.

I thought this one was fun, because really, the board only got me in to persuade the chair not to do the golf game.

Right. Okay. And is that quite a large part of your job too, sometimes just telling people when not to do?

Yeah, there's definitely when not to do things. The other one is to not get too serious. So everyone who works for a company, that company is very serious about their product or their service. And that's not how games work. So sometimes you've got to let go of that and be prepared to be silly. At the very least in the design phase, in order to build something fun and engaging. You can make it more sensible and safe later on. In the design and build phase, you've got to go fun and silly, and it's very easy to lose sight of that, particularly if there's a committee involved.

Yes, that makes sense. And that's really good advice. Thank you. I understand you run a gamification guild. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

This is probably one of my favourite projects that I work on at any one point. I facilitate the Gameful Leadership Guild, which is a bunch of people who are in the middle of a gamification project, There are different phases. They might be planning it, designing it, launching it, have launched it and as well as teaching them key bits about gamification, we learn loads from each other. And what we found over the past couple of years of running this and it meets every other week is that even completely different products end up having the same issues, or what you think might have a completely different audience has the same audience and they can learn from each other. People are people, and we will have some similarities. And there's a lot we can learn from each other. And for me, it's brilliant, because I get to see projects progressing. But also what happens after they've launched. And a lot of gamification campaigns tend to be launched and then forgotten about. Let's move on to the next thing, when actually for long-term engagement, there's a lot more you can do. So people get in touch with me, and they can come along and try a session out, then they get hooked. So it's just held online at the moment, and I think it will have to stay online because people are members from all over the world.

Yeah, it makes it so much more accessible, doesn't it? Do you have any predictions on the future of gamification?

I do, I could be completely wrong. There's a bit of a secret to it, which is gamification is about stealing or borrowing from or being inspired by what works really well in the games industry. So we can keep an eye on that. And it tells us what's going to happen next in gamification. So the big thing we can see is machine learning and AI, helping us build personalised journeys for each customer or player so that people actually get the experience just tailored for them. Because everyone likes different bits of games or different elements of it. That's happening in the big games and that will have to happen in gamification as well. And if I've got a client who's doing exactly that in the health space already It's definitely something that can work and does work. I think one of the things that works really well with gamification is immersion.

Immersing yourself in more of the seem more of the content more of the story. I'm not a big fan of buzzwords sometimes, but I guess the metaverse is going to have an impact to say I
And the other thing is broadening out all the time into what industry sits in. It started off actually, funnily enough in marketing and finance and banking. Now you see it across everything from sustainability health, learning almost every aspect of the employee experience has got gamification platforms or possibilities now If it hasn't got it yet, then that'll be one of the areas is growing in this year.

Amazing. Oh, thank you so much. If people want to get in touch with you, where should they go?

Just to go to Pete jenkins.com. And then from there, there's links to the company website, gamificationplus.uk or the conference, I run Gamification Europe, and of course, reach out and connect to me on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

So Gamification, Europe, can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Gamification Europe started five years ago. And what I like to do is bring together all the best practices and case studies and examples of gamification that are out there so we can learn from them. Because of the times we're in, this year it's online towards the end of March. It's five days long, but each day is themed to a different area of gamification. So the first day is a learning experience day. So there are loads of cool examples how to use it in learning. 
The second day is health and wellness and health and well-being day, which is the day I'm going to be most interested in as it's the type of work I'm doing at the moment. 

The third day is community engagement, which is actually the day where we get some of the more interesting marketing ideas, actually. So how do you motivate, engage and grow your communities and get them to actually do what you want them to be doing? 

The fourth day is the customer experience day, all about what we've just been talking about. There's a speaker who actually designs and builds immersive experiences for theme parks. We're gonna hear from him about how you can do that for the customer and marketing experience, which I think is going to be a brilliant talk. And then the final day is about employee experience, which is everything from recruitment, psychometric testing, skills testing, through to innovation and being more productive as well reach out. Maybe I can even put a discount code together for listeners.

Oh, fantastic. Thanks so much. While you might see me there.

My pleasure. And thanks for having me on the show.

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