Social media and marketing trends emerge often, and a buzzword you may not be familiar with, ‘gamification,’ is gaining notoriety. Gamification is the use of pseudo game-play mechanics in non-game scenarios and applications. The main goal here is to utilize consumer web and mobile sites to encourage users to stay on a brand website longer, and interact frequently.
Game-based marketing can be an effective social media strategy because it fits well in today’s overwhelmingly digital world. Users are bombarded with an overflow of information, brand pushing, and marketing messages from various sources. That information is then forwarded to social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Currently, Samsung and Warner Bros. are examples of mainstream corporations utilizing ‘gamification.’ To put it simply, gamification engages people with reward-seeking behaviors that lead to increased brand loyalty, and increased profits.
Instead of constantly throwing brand info at users with online or mobile content, adhering to the “fingers crossed” expectance of consumption, gamification allows consumers to be players of a game. If said consumers are active socially on a company site and comment on articles, forward links to friends, or check in to specific locations, they win points, badges, and various virtual rewards as opposed to concrete rewards attainable through the likes of a frequent flyer program. This also creates competition among users which adds the addiction factor.
But, as innovative as this all sounds, there are critics who voice negative opinions about this marketing strategy. Gamification allows companies to track the online activity of people who sign up for such programs and lets corporations gather more detailed metrics about each user, especially active customers.
Critics state that one risk of gamification is that it promotes the most superficial aspects of gaming like “points” in an attempt to manipulate users. Ian Bogost, a professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, refers to these programs as “exploitationware.”
Kris Duggan, chief executive of Badgeville states, “game techniques, prompt consumers to spend more time on company websites, contribute more content and share more product information with Facebook and Twitter adherents… clients he designs for use a gamification program to collect information about 300 actions — like posting comments or sharing with a social network — performed by several million people.”
Although ethical questions have been raised about this new technique, it does have the potential to increase profitability and is on the rise with large-scale corporations.
Do you do you feel that ‘gamification’ is an invasion of privacy or, will it become more successful and be picked up by other mainstream corporations?
Source: The San Diego Union Tribune
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