With more than 60% of millennials and 53% of Gen Zs preferring ‘experiential events’ in their shopping experiences, it’s time to get your game on.

The quest to sustain brand loyalty & consumer engagement has changed drastically in recent times as the focus is no longer on attracting your customers. With an overload of promotions & information targeted at audiences on a daily basis, there is a need to engage & hook them in other ways that keeps them coming back for more.

What is Gamification?

Simply put, gamification is the addition of game elements into typically non-game contexts, such as marketing, education and even health. Termed as the ‘new way’ of experience design, gamification helps to increase consumer engagement through the rewarding of points, achievement badges and loyalty programmes.

Why Games?

Think of it as giving all 3 forms of entertainment, rewards and education to your consumers, within a single medium. By putting in game elements such as a points system, it gives consumers a competitive edge to want to keep playing and appear on the leaderboard. Whilst they’re having fun doing this, they’re also unconsciously keeping in touch with your game and your brand. Since people generally dislike hard sales, gamification allows you to create a natural, genuine connection with your consumers that can be sustained through further extensions into loyalty programs.

What’s more, there’s no better time to hop on to the gaming trend with the current rise in esports & mobile gaming in Singapore. As the government supports esports tournaments like the recent Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) M2 World Championship and people rely more on entertainment & leisure during a pandemic, gaming has become more prevalent and accepted in our society today. Brands can even leverage on the character and audio branding of the games to build brand affinity and recognition, making it a valuable investment in retaining your consumers’ attention.

How can Gamification be carried out?

Before you think of taking on a second job as a game developer, it’s not about developing a novel gaming software (you could), but rather it’s implementing elements of a game into existing touchpoints of the consumer journey.

For example, engage your audience seamlessly through augmented reality (AR) filters on social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat. These apps usually detect users’ facial features and transports them into an alternative gami-verse, where they can be seen collecting objects or interacting with elements (e.g. IG stickers) that are endorsed by a brand. Usually, information about the products are intertwined into the game’s objective as well so your consumers can be educated on its benefits. You can check out how we did it for Yeos’ over here.

Another channel that you can infuse a game in is your loyalty programmes. Since loyalty programmes often entail the collection of points, utilize these features and transform it into a game. For the skincare brand, Cetaphil, we created a microsite where members of their loyalty programme can play an ‘acne-exterminator’ game to get rid of acne and earn ceta-coins towards their account. These ceta-coins can then be redeemed for more rewards, giving consumers an incentive to come back to the website for more.

Besides entertaining & rewarding, gamification can also be used to educate. People learn best when they are having fun and that was the approach we took in dishing out Lian He Zao Bao’s Fake News Education Campaign. Since millennials take up a large proportion of the digital audience and aren’t the most familiar with news in mandarin, we decided to dish out ‘fake news’ quizzes to them in an external microsite that was easy to understand and navigate. This not only helped the company engage with their younger audience, but provided them with valuable information that was applicable to their lives as well.

Games are only getting more popular by the decade, as the world becomes increasingly digital and entertainment-hungry. Get on your marks, and get set to start gamifying your consumer’s experience today. Not sure where to begin? Speak to us now!