"You really only have between five and 10 seconds to make an impression on people, so you use little tricks," says Adam Archer, one of the founders of Games that Give. "At what point do you ask people to share with their friends? They are most likely to share right after they've won something."
And sharing online might just be more valuable than word-of-mouth—because it's easy to track. But it's part of the same mission, Zichermann says.
"What you're trying to do with gamification as a business owner, is identify your most loyal fans, engage them to both generate more revenue for you and fire them up to become brand evangelists for you," Zichermann says.
Dig Deeper: The Power of Loyalty-Card Apps
Rewarding Customers Through Gamification: Don't Creep Out Your Customers
The danger of offending consumers' senses of privacy is a detail of which to remain consistently aware.
"With gamification, you have access to the underlying behavioral data in a massive-scale way. Instead of flying blind, you can know exactly what people are doing on your site," Smedresman says. "After you have that, this non-blindness of what people are doing, you can start manipulating that. That's gamification."
GroupMe might offer group chat today, but tomorrow, it might suggest places for active groups to go meet, and spend money, Jared Hecht, one of the company's founders, told Inc.com at SXSW.
"It means that people who have a vested interest in manipulated consumers' behavior are going to be a lot more sophisticated about that," Smedresman says. "It's going to be our jobs as consumers to be mindful as to when we're being exposed to these incentivisers."
Dig Deeper: 4 Essential Data-Mining Tools
Rewarding Customers Through Gamification: Build in an Autonomous Feel-Good Aspect
With every consumer motivated by slightly different impulses and rewards, consider one of the most influential customer trends of the decade: Going green. Pushing customers toward feeling like they're doing good—either for themselves, or a greater cause—can be another powerful motivator. In the case of Recyclebank, it's lowering your electricity use or landing more of what comes into your house in packaging from the grocery store in your recycle bin.
"We've done side-by-side comparisons: If you integrate a socially responsible theme to the brand, you can see an increase by 40 percent in engagement—the time they spend in the game—over 40 percent in retention, and over 50 percent higher virality," Archer says. That means the user is more than 50 percent more likely to invite their friends to play, or, in other words, to become an ambassador for the brand.
While Games That Give develops entire autonomous game systems to represent a brand, Nissan has adopted just a few game mechanics for its Carwings, a system that keeps track of all of your car's fuel use, battery status, efficiency, and more. The program not only gives you feedback on your efficiency, but also puts your stats in competition with those of other Nissan Leaf drivers.
Is the big green pat on the back enough of a reward for your customers to continue interacting with a giving-back gamified system? Maybe not, says Skey of Recyclebank.
"I wish I could say the rewards are secondary, but I don't think they are yet," Skey says. With that in mind, Recyclebank rewards its users with grocery and goods coupons. "It would be great to get to the point where diminishing your footprint and increasing your eco-IQ was reward enough."
Dig Deeper: How to Encourage Your Customers to Do Good
Rewarding Customers Through Gamification: Additional Applications
If Burke and Gartner are correct, the corporate applications for these game-design tactics are going to go way beyond customer rewards. Consider, Burke suggests, that Michellin uses online alternate-reality portal Second Life as a training program for enterprise architects.
"I believe that employee performance in a company environment is a growing use," Burke says. "Companies are starting to—instead of using a training manual or holding quarterly reviews—move toward a social-networking environment for performance and performance feedback."
It's not too much of a stretch to imagine a system in which an employee is awarded a badge or points for a speedy and well-crafted response to a boss's e-mail. But what about a system that tracks employees' behaviors in order to quantify work completed? What about crowdsourcing research and development? What about incentivising word-of-mouth promotion? Countless applications abound, both inside the walls of a company and out.
Now that companies are thinking outside of credit-card color-schemes and flight miles as rewards, not even the virtual sky is a limit to what can be done in this space.
Dig Deeper: Creative Employee Training Ideas
