Why Gamification Works
While the term gamification wasn’t uttered before 2002, the concept has been around and in use for much longer. Rewards have been used to foster customer loyalty for over a hundred years. We now know that good marketing content is not just about looking; it’s about experiencing. Using gamification allows you to connect, communicate and engage with fans. Let’s learn about the history of gamification, why, and how it works to your advantage.
History of Gamification
EdTech Magazine posits that the concept was in use in 1896 when marketers sold stamps to retailers who used them to reward customer loyalty. Fast forward to 1980, when Thomas Malone published a work introducing the idea that computer games provided learners intrinsic motivation to increase their intelligence. Companies really began to utilize the concept of loyalty rewards in the 1980s, finding unprecedented results.
Nick Pelling, British computer programmer and inventor, coined the term gamification in 2002. It became a mainstream concept when added to Gartner’s “Hype Cycle” list in 2011. Now you can see examples of gamification being used to change behavior in a multitude of contexts such as education, crowdsourcing, employee satisfaction, healthcare, and most importantly, marketing.
What is Gamification?
Gamification expert and author of “Actionable Gamification,” Yu-Kai Chou, defines the term as “the craft of deriving all the fun and addicting elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities.” By making advertising fun, users are allowed to experience several of their natural human desires: learning, socializing, mastery, achievement, and status.
Why People Love Games
Dopamine is the neurochemical commonly associated with happiness, and it plays a vital role in human motivation. The chemical provides an addictive feel-good response that drives pursuance of more fun. Research has also indicated that dopamine response is increased when part of a game’s result is left up to chance. Dopamine also enhances memory encoding and recall, which is very useful when games are used in education and marketing.
How It Works For You
Interactive content is more successful than static content. More engagement means visitors are less likely to scroll past what they’re seeing. Gamification allows for interaction with the added benefit of motivation for the visitor to achieve status and rewards, which can be as simple as a sense of accomplishment. As visitors become motivated to complete tasks and achieve rewards, they become customers. The more time visitors spend interacting with your content, the more you learn about them, allowing for personalization. Fanisko employs augmented reality, gamification, fan engagement analytics, and artificial intelligence to transform the way you connect with your fans. Know your audience, build connections, enhance your brand, drive sales and increase brand loyalty with Fanisko.