Gamification Essay Draft

To what degree is gamification of marketing changing the online advertising environment?

Advertising, by definition, is the techniques used to sell a product or idea. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the internet and smartphones have given the advertising industry not only a way to get one on one access to the people it is advertising to, but it has also lead to the ability to provide interactivity as well, invaluable tools for gathering demographic information, and also for directly advertising. Gamification is one marketing strategy that has come out of this constant access to the public, and I believe, of the reasons that a large majority of the advertising world is beginning to shift to a mobile space.

So what exactly is gamification? It’s the idea of using gambling and gaming to sell a product. Applications such as FourSquare, which rewards you based on the amount of times you have checked into a place, and GetGlue, which provides stickers based on what movies and television shows you’re watching, are examples of using instant gratification, and rewards, to inspire an audience into taking part in your product. If you’ve ever bought a Happy Meal from McDonalds, where they allow you scratch a card off to win something, they’re relying on your need to “get” something out of the product, to inspire you into buying said product.

In line with this, human beings are proven to be more receptive to an idea that provides instant gratification, meaning that they immediately feel gratified by what they have done. This idea works similarly to the way that addictive drugs do, in that you get a rush of dopamine, causing your mind to feel happy, even for a moment, which we then begin to crave. This idea translates to a large amount of the internet, where everything is instantaneous.

Gamification manipulates this idea of instant gratification into making you want to buy something, not just for the product, but for what you get as well as the product. On the Internet, services that actively try and sell products, such as Amazon and Steam, as well as other smaller sites, use this as a sort of gambling-marketing hybrid.

Steam, the worlds largest digital video game distributor, runs a holiday sale each year at Christmas, and again in the summer. These sales typically discount a game by at least 25%, but usually a lot higher, going up as high as 90%. This is usually enough to get somebody to jump on the deals, simply because of the massive price increase. However, they have recently begun making the sales into a game, as well. When purchasing a game during this years Christmas sale, they rewarded you with a card. This card would be one of a group of ten, selected at random. Once you had ten of these cards, you were able to turn them in to a badge, to get a couple of extra items for your account. What this did was cause people to firstly enjoy the gamble of getting a card when they bought a game. Where they going to get one they already had? Would it finish their collection? As mentioned above, this triggered a release of dopamine, causing the user to become happy. This is the same theory behind gambling. Get the user to feel happy after interacting with your product, and they’ll buy more. This gamification of Steam takes it a step further. Provide the user with an actual reward, 100% of the time. Give them an item, and it will cause them to put more money into the store, in the hopes of getting more of said items. The ability to combine these items into more items, again with that thrill of not knowing what you’re going to get, inspires that gambling thrill in the mind, and makes users throw more and more into the system, again in a sort of gambling-shopping fusion.

This is just one example of how games are used to make a product or service more appealing to a consumer. As stated above, lots of companies are beginning to offer rewards for using their products, and some services are even hard-embedding them into the way they work. An example of this is FourSquare, a social network based around checking in to places as you visit them. For example, when a user checks into a location, he gets a badge added to his collection. The person that owns the most of these badges from one location becomes that locations “mayor”. This fosters competition between frequent customers, and drives them to visit more. FourSquare takes advantage of this frequent use of the application by competitors to drive up advertisement views, and encourages businesses to take part through being able to drive up visitors.

Gamification is the transformation of advertising into games, and takes advantage of the human minds predisposition towards gambling, collection, and addiction, to invoke feelings of loyalty and joy in the customer or user of a product, and ties it to the Internet, which is ever present since the advent of smartphones. The world of advertising and marketing is changing towards being more centralised around gamification, due to these advantages, especially in the format of selling products to a customer. Through phone applications, the ability to monitor purchases is growing, and the market is changing to take advantage of what gamification provides them, both in customer loyalty, and selling potential.