Remember those blissful student days heading down to the local at the prescribed ‘Happy Hour’ to get the 50p drinks. I say blissful…those nights generally started off blissfully anyway.
Happy Hours were generally just that.
Both on the pocket, and for that hour anyway, a happy place to be. Everyone happily buying the drinks they would normally be paying double for, celebrating with friends. What you might not have realised at the time was that these simple Happy Hours were a real-life example of what we now call gamification in marketing.
If you’re still interested, Happy Hours utilise the key game mechanic of ‘appointment’ (an action required at a scheduled time)…see you were just playing games all along.
Gamification is essentially about creating game-like experiences for services. It is a key area of growth in marketing over the coming year and one that has been driven massively by social media platforms. Games that dominate your Facebook feeds such as Farmville are no longer just about hi-scores. Gone (sadly) are the days of Spectrum games and broken keyboards, damaged whilst attempting to beat CPU on the leaderboard list of track and field.
Today, gamification is about social engagement, virtual products and emotional connection, oh and rewards. But one thing that hasn’t been lost is the so-called gaming mechanics that were very much part of those long forgotten spectrum games. Game mechanics are the mechanisms that today’s ‘services’ are utilising and developing to bring even the most mundane tasks into the arena of brand connection.
Seriously, pitching a game that was based on farming tasks, waiting tables or walking around a city would’ve had most dragons saying “I’m out!” But when you understand just what mechanics these games are using, you can begin to see why they are proving such a hit – and why they are such a good guide for other businesses looking to exploit this explosion in game-led marketing.
The list of game mechanics is big, but here’s just a few:
• Achievements
• Appointments
• Blissful Productivity
• Behavioural Momentum
• Countdown
• Free Lunch
• Loss Aversion
• Levels
• Epic Meaning
• Quests
• Urgent Optimism
The list is even longer, but it is these techniques that underpin some of the very biggest and best games you can think of.
All of these can be utilised by, relatively speaking, any business to produce the kind of marketing games that not only enhance your brand, but can create real and sometimes very strong revenues.
The best way to think about gamification is in the value these mechanics can bring to a marketing campaign. This isn’t just about making a game that leads to free stuff. It runs deeper than that, indeed starting to develop a game on the basis that it leads to free stuff is almost always a sure-fire way to ensure your game (or marketing campaign) won’t succeed.
Utilising gaming mechanics can even enhance guerrilla and direct mail campaigns, whilst games themselves have the potential to revolutionise loyalty schemes and sales campaigns. The challenge, as always, is to look past the confusing technical terms at the sound psychological marketing techniques that can be applied and utilised by any brand.
In the meantime I’m heading down to the local student bar to play on my smartphone and drink my 50p vodka and coke…must dash “Happy Hour” only lasts another 2 hours.
Turning the teaching of Financial Education from dull to delightful….
Simon Brooke is a Director at Happy Creative, a strategic marketing and creative branding agency based in Blackpool, Lancashire. To learn more or contact us please go to www.happy-creative.co.uk or @Happy_Creative
