Status rankings seem to be fundamental to humans' worldviews—and that's about feeling loved by something you've invested energy, time, or money in.
When JetBlue Airways was just starting out in the early 2000s, it didn't have a loyalty program. Instead, it offered a bevy of customer services that other airlines didn't consistently: Leather seats, customizable in-flight entertainment, snacks aplenty, cheap tickets, and consistently kind employees. That wasn't enough.
That lasted exactly two years before enough customer surveys mounted up begging for a frequent-flier program that the True Blue miles program was founded. "This is true with every industry. It's going from a nice-to-have to a must-have," Zichermann says. "It's a way for small companies to take advantage in their market vertical."
He posits that gamifying an aspect of your company could be more beneficial than was early-adopting social media. "How many more sales we get from our Twitter feed is still unclear to people," he says. "But as soon as you get someone hooked on your system versus someone else's, the harder it is to switch, and that's profits."
Any coupon-clipper or group deal-site aficionado knows that it feels pretty good to snag a deal the Joneses might not have spotted. Consider LevelUp, one of the newest group-deal websites. Its premise: Purchase a Groupon-like deal, say, $10 worth of ice cream at Toscanini's in Boston for $5. Instant win. After you purchase that deal, another is offered to you, perhaps 60 or 75 percent off ice cream from the same shop. Bonus point.
"It's kind of a re-molding of what was kind of a passive job of coupon clipping 40 years ago," says Samantha Skey, the chief revenue officer for Recyclebank, a business that works with communities build household incentives into recycling or saving energy. "It's an activist buyer who is gaming the system to get the best deal when she goes to buy those lemons. That consumer—and her desire to do the right thing and feel smart and get a good deal—is at the heart of what we do."
Recyclebank's business is to profit from cities actively processing less trash and doing more recycling, but go to its website, and it just looks like fun. "Earn points. Get rewards. Better the planet," it reads.
Dig Deeper: The Pros and Cons of Using Groupon
Rewarding Customers Through Gamification: Constantly Consider Your Customers' Motivation
In building a system to deliver rewards for your customers, it's important to consider first your goals. Are you primarily attempting to encourage brand loyalty—or are you trying to meet new customers? Are you trying to give customers something light and fun—or are you looking to amass more valuable customer data?
Next, consider within a system what specifically about your audience or customer base you can specifically reward. Simultaneously consider any aspects that could potentially turn them off. For example, if you're targeting a young audience of early adopters for whom sharing neat things or achievements with friends is natural, offer social-media sharing into your rewards system. But that might not work for everyone.
Brian Burke, the research vice president at Gartner, a global research firm that published a study on the expanding reach of gamification for companies, said that different people are motivated by different responses, so finding a good fit—particularly regarding social media and asking customers to disclose information—is key.
"There is some portion of the target audience that's likely to never engage because they find it creepy," he says. "Other segments of the population play games to develop relationships and find social interaction. Inherently, you're never going to reach 100 percent of the population."
Burke says his research into motivation and game-play, when conducting the study that determined that by 2015, 50 percent of companies that manage innovation and research will use gamification to drive innovation, he found that not all people play for the same reason. While he classified people into categories of explorers, achievers, and killers—those with an "I win, you lose" mentality—and those who play just for the social interaction. "There are some people out there who want no one else to know anything about them, and there are other people who want to push social interactions and foster bonds," Burke says.
For Games that Give, a company that builds Facebook games for brands, consumer-sharing is essential to a game's success. The goal for a Facebook game with heavy brand-integration is the same as any basic marketing: Eyeballs. So, going viral through heavy online sharing of scores, successes, and enjoyment of the game by players is key. But it's also a tricky thing to encourage.
