Gamification - Consumer Level Up!

Last year my professor, Gary Kayye, who coincidentally had me start this blog, had my class read the book The Invisible Brand. Naturally, I procrastinated reading the book until too close to the test, but when I got around to it, I found it to be very enjoyable.

The book dealt with many issues like AI, advertising, psychotechnology, automation, machine learning, and big data, but the issue that captured my attention the most was how the author, William Ammerman, discussed the concept of gamification.

Ammerman discussed a gamer's dedication to his/her progression in a given game. He also discussed the willingness of gamers to spend hours on end to get an achievement or a badge, and how much more they are willing to spend to get the last achievement or badge in a set.

"A game’s designer might hook players early, by, say, making it easy to level up for slaying some incompetent goblins. But the players must then defeat more powerful enemies or solve more dastardly puzzles before they earn their next reward." - William Ammerman

You know how when you read about something, or learn a new word, you suddenly encounter in everywhere. Well, it took a few months for me to notice, but very few companies aren't engaging in some way with gamification.

A couple of companies I'm sure everyone is familiar with, Starbucks, Chick-Fil-A, and Uber, all use rewards programs where customers level up. The programs offer better rewards as they gain higher levels.

The encounter that brought this gamification thing to the forefront of my mind though, is Microsoft Rewards. I thought Microsoft Rewards had been a program that rewarded me for purchases I made on Xbox with points that I could redeem for sweepstakes. But as it turns out when you accumulate enough points you can redeem the rewards for gift cards, but the feature that baffled me was that you get five points per search on Bing.

Don't get me wrong I'm definitely a Google searcher, however, over the past 30 days I've averaged about 65 searches a day. You can check your google search history at myactivity.google.com. But that means if I use Bing as my search engine for 23 days, I can redeem my points for a $10 Xbox gift card. That is actual cash towards my next game purchase.

The larger aspect to consider though, is how trivial an act searching something is and now we can get rewards for it. I think in the next few years we see many other companies capitalize on trivial tasks to gain consumer loyalty.

I might not be willing to switch my default search engine because the verb is to google something not to bing it, but I am definitely excited to see where this goes.

Until Next Time...