Understanding Gamification

Gamification has changed business in terms of engagement, product advertising, and employee motivation. Creative, unique gamification techniques in various industries have resulted in greater adoption across the board. With a global value of $9.1 Billion in 2020, the gamification market is projected to reach $30.5 Billion in 2025. That’s a staggering compound annual growth rate of 27.1%. Retail and education industries dominate the gamification industry, with banking, recruitment, government sectors, and healthcare closely following suit. Moreover, small and medium scale businesses are also adopting human-centric event gamification for their products.

So, how do gamification and gamified approaches help businesses? Let’s break down the concepts to answer this question.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the process of adding game mechanics, game design elements, and principles into non-game activities, tasks, or processes. Alternatively, it can be defined as a problem-solving approach via a set of activities and processes inspired or directly taken from elements of game playing (e.g., point scoring, competition with others).

The concept of gamification is hardly new, although gamifying marketing, education, and other sectors are recent trends. It leverages our natural inclinations towards competition, achievement, collaboration, and charity to incentivize engagement. By making real-world tasks game-like, with rewards for completion and a chance to compete against peers, gamification motivates one to complete those activities.

The Benefits of Gamification

Gamification drives engagement to influence business outcomes. Leveraging gaming techniques helps attract and retain users due to its highly-interactive approach. Broadly, benefits of gamification include:

1. Higher Engagement: Gamification of tasks and day-to-day processes can create 40% more user engagement.

2. Increased User Retention: Gamifying marketing and learning campaigns can increase newly registered users by 6x, as well as boost user retention with a user-focused, customized approach.

3. Improved Employee Productivity and Motivation: 48% of employees saw increased motivation when introduced to gamified techniques in their day-to-day operations. The same study indicates gamification inspired 72% of participants to work harder.

4. Greater Brand Awareness and Increase in Value: Gamified marketing campaigns that solicit user engagement and social collaboration create better brand awareness and increase the value of an organization/product.

How Can Businesses Leverage and Implement Gamification?

Gamification techniques may be simple to implement, but that means it is easy to go overboard. Going too far ahead with gamifying tasks can produce negative results and hinder business outcomes. Here are a few items to remember while leveraging gamification for businesses:

1. Create a Long-Term Solution: Instead of immediately going all-in on gamification, consider its long-term implications. Create a sustainable, easy-to-customize solution that can be modified for a variety of organizational goals.

2. Do Not Go Overboard on Rewards: Flashier rewards create instant gratification and lack long-term engagement while costing significantly more. In place of big rewards, offer creative prizes for participants who complete smaller milestones.

3. Invest in An Easy-to-Understand Platform: A level playing field is vital for gamified platforms, so no participant feels left out. Remove any undue advantages that your audience can tap into, thus ensuring fairness.

4. Celebrate Participation and Social Collaboration: Some businesses make the mistake of only celebrating the top contestants in their gamified campaigns. Measure at least part of everyone’s performance by participation because the more people that participate, the more recognition the product or brand receives. Businesses that emphasize social collaboration significantly increase their brand value.

5. Integrate Intelligent KPIs to Track and Report Results: Tracking and reporting is a huge part of any business process, which is no different for gamified tasks. Leverage tools to track performance, participation, and other metrics with a simple dashboard. Share progress and reward information to users to further motivate them.

Examples of How Companies are Using Gamification

Let’s look at some recent examples of gamification:

1. Nike + Run is perhaps the best example of gamification in the health sector. By gamifying daily runs, calories burned, health levels, and providing the ability to compete with peers, Nike + Run is a pioneer in the space.

2. Read-Along by Google uses voice technology to encourage children to read and follow stories. This android-only app has gained immense popularity worldwide.

3. Reddit is an excellent example of social-website gamification. Its badges, leaderboards, customizable avatars, and coins have helped make it one of the ten most visited websites.

4. Starbucks has been an early adopter of gamification with its rewards program. Starbucks Rewards integrates gaming elements while rewarding participants with prizes, including free drinks and food.

The adoption of gamification is increasing across industries. As larger organizations continue to push the boundaries of existing gamification practices, we will likely see tighter integration with immersive technologies like augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. In addition, the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning into gamification, especially gamified marketing, is already providing tremendous value in customizing the user experience. Lastly, with 5.29 billion unique mobile phones globally, mobile-first gamification strategies will continue to dominate the market.

Are you ready to take the next step for your organization’s market reach? Gamification may be just the boost you need. If you are curious how Quantilus can help your business or would like more information, contact us at info@quantilus.com or on our website and we can set up a time to talk.