Dear Reader, You got played! 👾
A compilation of some of the most iconic anecdotes & instances of gamification.
Starting the note with a 1000 words 😅
One simply doesn’t talk about gamification without the “Britannia khao, World Cup Jao” campaign that used an exceptional topical opportunity with a well calculated reward scheme and unlocked its way to more than 30% profit growth!
What's this got to do with Gamification: Each product had points - More expensive products had more points - 100 points led to getting 1 collectible - 9 collectibles gave a chance at watching the 1999 World Cup Live. Intense right? Well clearly it worked.
Now that we have your attention. Let’s take it from the start! Brands for ages have been using the concepts of Gamification to drive user behavior in different ways.
In our first Sandbox Experimentation session, Madhav Joshi who heads Gamification for Engagement at Zee5, took us through different concepts and ideas from his work. Extending the culture of brainstorming to the Sandbox format, Harshit Manocha who heads the community got folks share their learnings, experiences & anecdotes of having been on the other side!
(P.S. More about the community & our sessions here)
One of the key learnings for sure was Madhav’s very structured approach! Here’s how it went:
Think : What stage of the user life cycle do we want to work on?
From Acquisition to Advocacy.
This could be a data back hypothesis or a strategic decision.
Understand : What metrics do we want to move in that stage of the life cycle? How deeply can you establish the metric?
Reflect : Does gamification make sense at a broad level to move the metric or is it better solved by another method?
Let’s go: Creating the experiment, testing and product-ising the gamification.
Let’s dive into the example we indulged in, For the OTT use case i.e out of the bazillion metrics, if we had to increase ‘Number of App Visits’.
Interestingly, one would imagine that it's a content industry, good videos & content should solve every metric. However, a good video only increases the ‘Time spent per visit’ and not the former metric.
Madhav Shared three lens that’s allowing him to crack the problem statement!
1. Use of Social for Gamification
Why do we keep going back to all our social apps? For the interaction! How does one flirt with these ideas in the OTT space?
Adding comments that then excite the user to see if anyone replies, likes the comment.
Adding community threads to trending content, creating a reason to return.
2. Gamification via Recognition
Remember when Zomato reviews were new, everyone cared about what Level of Reviewer they were? Creating opportunities for recognition and tying them with perk goes a long way
How does 1 apply this to the OTT industry?
Imagine if 5-10 movies gave you the title of a “Movie Buff” which you could then publicise on your socials.
Or if 15 movies of SRK made you the “biggest SRK fan”, maybe a campaign around his birthday.
3. Gamification via Rewards
Rewards have been one of the earliest forms of Gamification that business adapted to, from your 10th coffee free to everything we know today.
How do you bring it to the OTT industry and the use case in question? Imagine rewarding doing multiple actions like - rating a movie, renting a movie, sharing a recommendation and so on.
Speaking of rewards, the community had a lot to say!
They shared an example of Gamification that stayed with them, one answer stood out more than any other. You however get no ‘coins’ for guessing. ( see what we did there? )
The (in)famous story of CRED Coins brought a very amazing concept to life!
“Burn Drives Earn, Earn doesn’t drive Burn” ( put that on a T-shirt) What that essentially means is that while a lot of brands, companies etc drive collecting or scoring Reward points, the only one who can succeed are the ones who have a great way to Redeem that really drives the user to keep the loop going.
Ask yourself: How many times have you been able to use the Offer Scratch cards from Google Pay v/s How you track your credit card reward points and their ease of redemption!
Taking the smooth segway of Google pay, we spoke about another brilliant use case of gamification which is Feature Adoption & Education
Anyone remember the Google Pay Diwali campaign?
While it comes across as any other reward based campaign, what stood out this particular campaign was to get the users to try a width of features or types of payments rather than simply the scan and pay which continues to be the biggest use case.
If one dissects and tries to track it back. An experiment or campaign like this could have come from data led insights like “people who use 3+ use cases are more likely to be retained on GPay”.
Fun Fact: Microsoft added Solitaire to the Windows PC to teach people how to use the mouse with the right, left click and the drag-drop.
Another interesting concept came from the house of Google about how they used Gamification to enhance the product ( which TBH is a masterstroke 💣 )
The Goole Maps Local Guide Program - Let’s Reverse Engineer!
Imagine this - You are some important person on the google maps team. You realise the more populated and accurate Google Maps are - the more usage you drive and creates a growth loop.
You think to yourself? What makes us more usable?
Reviews of places ( & the more detailed the better )
Photos of places
Timings & Contact details of shops and stores.
Key information like : Accessibility, Parking etc
Having people’s questions answered
Awesome! Now I just need to get users to help me. But how?
Let’s create levels.
But how do we keep it exciting, rewarding and meaningful enough?
You guessed it : Rewards & Community & Recognition
And, this is probably only half of all the things we discussed! To keep you wanting for more, we’d zip our lips for now & come back with more deep dives from our sessions again.
On a closing note, Paraphrasing Madhav on something that stayed with us is that once you get into the gamification mindset there is little stopping, from one stage of the customer journey to the next, all the way to advocacy.
If you have reached this far, you deserve a reward! Here are 3 amazing pieces of content to watch to get a taste of gamification & some stories gone too far!
Watch: Pepsi where’s my Jet on Netflix
Experience: Try onboarding yourself and using DuoLingo for a week or so!
Until next time! Stay curious & keep playing.