Gamification is going to make marketing tech experiences of the future more engaging, more participatory, more emotional and, in many ways, more successful. Modern designs require creative that does more to keep users engaged. Gamification in marketing technology can reshape the experience, improving outcomes throughout the entire user journey.

As an experiential designer, I am interested in gamification as a way to motivate people to play, take action, learn and create memories of brand experiences.

Games are unrivaled at holding people’s attention, which is why people devote so much time, energy and money to interacting with video games. It is also why many industries draw inspiration from the compelling aspects of games and apply it to other applications such as branded experiences.

However, what I see most often with the standard gamification marketing approach, the majority of marketers are focused on a somewhat superficial view of games, like early arcade games. These would be applications that emphasize score, competition, badges, etc. as a way to foster participation. It is effective to a point: you can get people to buy cereal and even get checkups with their doctors who are incentivized with badges for participation, leveling up, or a leaderboard. But there are many other benefits of gamification and aspects that make games the pinnacle of long term, sustained and emotional engagement. As the experiential industry continues to gamify its events, installations, marketing technology and more – we’re going to see success in solutions that tap into more aspects of games than just tallying points.

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When thinking about how to engage people with interactions, my thought process often includes classic game components such as goals, rules, challenge, and social and role playing. Marketers interested in gamification should ask themselves six key questions during the creative process on how to get people to interact:

1. What is the object of the interaction?

Besides the marketing message – are you asking people to find something hidden that they need to find, is it amassing amounts of something, or simply being the fastest at a task? Every interaction in an experience benefits from having goals, and often we can look to classic game mechanics for what types of goals are going to be the most engaging. From treasure hunt behaviors, Twitch games, skill tests and more, these mechanics can be really successful to use.

2. What are the rules of this new alternate dimension we are creating?

There is joy behind what you’re not allowed to do. Players love rules because they establish a challenge, they are a basis of logic. “The floor is lava” is a motivating rule; knowing what you can’t do suddenly makes an amusing challenge out of moving about the room. Having rules creates drama, purpose and interest.

3. How do users know what to do?

There is something better than an Intuitive User Interface; priming the user into advanced behavior by using progressive steps. Games lead you along the path to acquire skills incrementally instead of instructing, so you begin with the easiest tasks that are playable lessons. Having the start button be a small jump if the game is largely built on increasingly complex jumping takes the first action as a moment to help you learn, and you continue from there by ratcheting up the complexity step by step. This differs from the intuitive UI approach, because games accept there are things you don’t know how to do. In branded experiences, having people come away from an experience having done something they didn’t know how to do before has huge rewards in creating positive emotions, memory,repeat participation, and increases the likelihood of adoption and advocacy.

4. How do they get better?

Skill building is its own reward. Getting better at something is motivating and it feels good to build new skills. So you should offer ways for people to get better at your interaction. Designers often have this false holy grail of ultimate usability, but the goal should be to make interactions both easy to understand, yet hard to master. People love a challenge, because it builds confidence, self worth and the bragging rights to do something not everyone can do. Every marketing tech interaction should allow for motivated, skilled players to attempt to strive for mastery.

5. How do they engage with those around them?

There is substantial social activity in gaming, from how you collaborate with other players to even the social aspect of belonging, commenting and watching. In an experience, how you involve a crowd–people waiting in line, friends, strangers, and online users–into an experience is incredibly important to get the most out of participation. Games do this by pitting players against each other, or offering quests that multiple players have to work together to accomplish. There can be rewards or penalties for sabotaging others. There can be dynamics where what you see is different from what other players see.

6. Who are they in this experience?

You’re asking the user to play the role of a character. One of the most fruitful questions you can ask when concepting an experience is, “Who are you?” As users, it can be refreshing to play the role of someone other than themselves, and it’s a way to learn a lot and have fun doing it. So many experiences are just an individual playing themselves, a brand manager or concert goer, but it’s much more fun to be a fashion model if you are an engineer, or a customer if you are a salesman. Anyone other than yourself.

There are infinite possibilities when we look to incorporate elements of games into marketing technology. As the generations that were raised in gaming culture have made it to leadership teams, we are going to see more gamification naturally infused into everything we know. And as games get more advanced, we will see infinitely new innovations in gamifying marketing experiences across industries.

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