Academic Journal of Digital Economics and Stability

Volume 29, May-2023

ISSN 2697-2212 Available Online: https://economics.academicjournal.io

Gamification in Marketing

Matthew N. O. Sadiku 1
Uwakwe C. Chukwu 2
Janet O. Sadiku 3

Abstract
Games have become favorite entertainment activity for many people worldwide. They are
capable of engaging people by tapping into fan knowledge and offering some rewards.
Gamification is a transformation of something into a game. It is a digital marketing term used to
describe the action of applying techniques of game playing to non-gaming environments such as
business, education, healthcare, marketing, etc. It is one of the most used strategies across the
digital marketing industry. A main goal of gamification marketing is to increase customer
interaction by offering rewards to participants. This paper provides an overview on gamification
marketing with examples.

Keywords: games, gamification, marketing, gamification marketing.

1
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Prairie View A&M University Prairie View, TX USA
2
Department of Engineering Technology South Carolina State University Orangeburg, SC, USA
3 Juliana King University Houston , TX, USA

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INTRODUCTION
Marketing is evolving with the world it inhabits. With the ever-changing technology, culture, and
business world, marketing is significantly affected and marketers need to be willing to step into new
territory.
Games are a way to capture your audience‟s attention. People love video games and video games
have worldwide appeal. Online gaming is on fire at the moment. Games attract more attention to
your website and to your products and services. Brands utilize games as an extra tool to advertise
and promote their products and services. Different uses of games are shown in Figure 1.
Gamification, as the name suggests, is using elements of gaming for the purposes of education,
healthcare, business, marketing, etc. It has been widely applied in marketing strategies over the
years. It is a strategy that uses game mechanics in a non-gaming context. It is essentially using
games on your website to encourage engagement. Gamification marketing is an enhanced
marketing technique that borrows design elements from games to attract and retain customers. It
could be as simple as offering rewards in a way that feels like a game. Although games and
gamification have a lot in common, they are not exactly the same [1,2].
WHAT IS GAMIFICATION?
The word "gamification" was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, a British inventor, but it did not
gain popularity until 2010. The idea of gamification came from the fact that the gaming industry
was the first to master human-focused design and we are now learning from games. Gamification
is not a new concept, but it is deeply rooted in marketing endeavors, such as points cards, grades,
and degrees, and workplace productivity [4]. Researchers became interested in gamification
because the concept could be implemented in different ways to motivate people. Gamification
has become hugely popular in all walks of life, including education.
The gamification can be viewed in two ways: (1) adopting the act of playing a video game into
everyday use, (2) the act of using game elements to make non-games more enjoyable. It is
applied in education, business, sports, marketing, and finance. It is currently one of the largest
trends in education. Traditional education has been found to be ineffective in motivating and
engaging many students. Gamification is cutting-edge approach which is producing positive
results in every region of the world.
Everyone loves games. Gamification just takes advantage of that innate desire. It can make
practice fun. It can make the routine less droll. Online games have become bolder and more
diverse. Gamification involves the introduction of gameplay to a traditionally non-game
environment. Its goal is to encourage user engagement.
Here are the typical elements of gameplay [5].
 Points - representing progress and accomplishment – often used to obtain rewards
 Badges- similar representation to points, often also representing a status
 Leader-boards - participant ranking
 Performance graphs - to measure individual user's performance over time
 Meaningful stories - narrative/context the user exists within
 Avatars - a visual representation of a user
 Teammates - others engaging in the game

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GAMIFICATION MARKETING
Since the average attention span is about 8 seconds, one marketing strategy that can be used to
capture the attention of an audience is by leveraging gamification. Gamification marketing
involves incorporating gaming elements into a non-gaming context to encourage users to take
specific actions. It is great in getting consumer attention. One can offer an exciting reward in
exchange for a customer‟s contact information, which can be added to the marketing emails list.
Gamification refers to the incorporation of game-style incentives into every day or non-game
activities. Gamification in marketing is basically adding elements from games to attract and
retain customers. It ignites people‟s sense of competition and urgency as they try to increase
their chances of winning. It can be used in advertising as a way of combining your ad units with
an interactive game. Figure 2 illustrates gamification marketing [6].
Whatever gamification strategy you choose to adopt, your priority should be making sure that
your audience has fun. Rewards are good, but the fun that comes with playing a game is equally
important. Your goal with gamification could be to [8]:
 Increase visitor time spent on page
 Increase order value by offering a discount
 Build brand loyalty with reward points
 Position your brand as the “fun” brand with frequent new games
 Educate customers about your brand and offers
 Collect more (& better) customer data
GAMIFICATION MARKETING EXAMPLES
The types of gamification ideas one come up with are only limited by imagination.
You can create games for holiday campaigns, product launches, discount offers, or even brand
promotion. The uses of gamification in marketing are illustrated in Figure 3 [7]. There are
several organizations that use gamification to engage users. These include US Army, KFC,
Hilton Garden, McDonald, and Starbucks. For example, KFC has its own gaming Twitter profile
called KFC Gaming where they engage over 269,000 followers with gaming-related tweets.
Everyone can participate in the game as long as they make a purchase from their friendly
neighborhood KFC. McDonald has succeeded in increasing their product sales by using
gamification concepts derived from the classic game of Monopoly. It takes place entirely offline.
McDonald‟s Monopoly game always attract many people, engaged in impulse buying just to get
tickets.
To get customers to interact with one another, Samsung has a function that allows users to
discuss current events and watch video clips. Dominos has incorporated gamification in to their
mobile pizza ordering app. After creating their gaming app “Pizza Hero,” which allows
customers to create their own Pizza, Domino‟s sales revenue increased by 30%. Starbuck„s
philosophy is focused on personal service in favor of consumers. As shown in Figure 4,
Starbucks incorporates your real-life purchases into a gamification method to enhance the
Starbuck‟s experience and to boost sales [9]. There‟s a lot to learn from these companies.
Gamification is not just for multinational corporations. Mint created a social media challenge
that engages users by inviting them to share their goals with the possibility of winning a $2,500
prize [10].

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BENEFITS
Gamification has become popular with marketers because it can inspire users to share user-
generated content. Gamification marketing is powerful, especially in e-commerce. It makes an
emotional connection with the audience and leads to a longer relationship. It can help you
improve your digital presence, increase engagement and interaction with your customers,
enhance their employees‟ training, conduct surveys with their audience, and gather data that
would be otherwise difficult for your business to acquire. Providing an immersive, engaging, and
fun experience with your brand will help customers to remember your name and this is one the
greatest benefits of a gamified campaign. Other benefits of gamification marketing include the
following [11,12]:
 Games bring fun and enjoyment to users
 Games are multi-generational and appeal to young and old alike
 Games can be formatted and converted to fit each platform
 Games disarm users from their aversion to marketing in order to inform them of new
products and services from a company
 Games are known to excite consumers and prompt them into returning via rewards for their
play
 People enjoy interactive content and they enjoy playing games
 A branded mini-game has the ability to have measurable engagement.
 With users engaging with games and inadvertently interacting with businesses, there is an
opportunity for businesses to display their messages
 The involvement of users in your campaign is higher
 Brand awareness and brand loyalty increase as visitors interact more with your content.
 Gamify's software helps create a one-stop-shop and is affordable
 Gamification marketing can influence buyer behavior
 It will help generate repeat customers and organic social shares
 It increases and improves user engagement
 It helps to grow brand awareness and loyalty
 It helps to gather useful customer data
 It educates the customer with your products or services
 It helps you collect data in a non-intrusive way
 It skyrockets the conversion rates as visitors become motivated to complete tasks for reward
 It increases customer engagement
CHALLENGES
In spite of its many benefits, gamification has some challenges too. Designing gamification is
difficult. Gamification takes time and money to conceptualize and create. It is challenging
because it involves not only designing a game that people want to play but also that achieves
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your business objectives. Every step of the design process requires several hours from highly-
skilled developers, graphics, and web designers [10]. Other challenges include the following:
 Making good games requires great creativity; so your brand should consider getting
professional advice from
 Game development usually takes a lot of time and money
 The game-making process includes designing, creating, and testing the game
 There are potential ethical implications raised by gamification marketing techniques
In spite these challenges, there are plenty of reasons for gamification marketing to be part of the
digital strategy of any brand within any industry.
CONCLUSION
Gamification occurs when you apply techniques and concepts from games to your marketing
strategy. It incorporates fun and an element of competition to a digital marketing strategy. It is
no longer considered an enigma to marketers. It is an interactive marketing strategy in which you
use game-like elements as a means of promotion. It has the ultimate goal of engaging the
audience. It is used to maximize user engagement, learning, organizational enhancement, the
usefulness of systems, crowdsourcing, and productivity. It can provide the answer to the
problems in traditional marketing. It has a major advantage over traditional marketing campaigns
when it comes to influencing customer behavior.
More and more companies are throwing traditional marketing techniques out the window
because they are uninviting, boring, and slow. Applying gamification in your marketing can help
to improve user engagement, drive more conversions, win you more sales, build loyalty among
customers, obtain data, entertain the audience, and create high-quality content. By incorporating
gaming features into your marketing strategy, you are creating new paths for your audience to
interact with your business. For more information about gamification in marketing, one should
consult the books in [13-17].
REFERENCES
1. M. N. O. Sadiku, S.M. Musa, and R. Nelatury, ”Digital games,” International Journal of
Research and Allied Sciences, vol. 1, no. 10, Dec. 2016, pp. 1,2.
2. B. Kim, “The popularity of Gamification i n the mobile and social era,”
Understanding Gamification, chapter 1 or Library Technology Report, vol. 51, no. 2,
February-March 2015, pp. 1-10.
3. J. Dale Prince, “Gamification,” Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, vol.10,
no. 3, 2013, pp. 162-169.
4. K. Seaborn and D. I. Fels, “Gamification in theory and action: A survey,” International
Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 74, 2015, pp. 14–31.
5. V. V. Abraham, “Gamification: A digital marketing strategy in the beauty industry,” October
2020, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gamification-digital-marketing-strategy-beauty-
industry-abraham
6. M. Pliszka, “Gamification in marketing,” September 2020,
https://videommerce.com/blog/gamification-in-marketing/

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7. K. Palka, “How to use gamification in your marketing strategy: Tips and advice,” January
2023, https://www.easypromosapp.com/blog/en/gamification-in-marketing-strategy/
8. J. Ventoniemi, “Try these 4 gamification marketing ideas to boost brand engagement,”
https://www.giosg.com/blog/gamification-marketing-ideas
9. “What is gamification in marketing? - Gamification definition,”
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10. S. Byne, “Everything you need to know about gamification marketing,” February 2022,
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marketing/
11. “The benefits of gamification for your marketing,” https://www.gamify.com/gamified-
marketing/the-benefits-of-gamification-for-your-marketing
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gamification
13. D. Griffin and A. van der Meer, Press Start: Using Gamification to Power-Up Your
Marketing. Bloomsbury Business, 2020.
14. T. Reiners and L. C. Wood (eds.), Gamification in Education and Business. Springer, 2015.
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16. Z. Chishti, Gamification Marketing for Dummies. For Dummies, 2020.
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AUTHORS
Matthew N.O. Sadiku is a professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, Texas. He is the author of several
books and papers. His areas of research interest include computational electromagnetics and
computer networks. He is a life fellow of IEEE.
Uwakwe C. Chukwu is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial & Electrical
Engineering Technology of South Carolina State University. He has published several books and
papers. His research interests are power systems, smart grid, V2G, energy scavenging, renewable
energies, and microgrids.
Janet O. Sadiku holds bachelor degree in Nursing Science in 1980 at the University of Ife, now
known as Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria and Master‟s degree from Juliana King
University, Houston, TX in December 2022. She has worked as a nurse, educator, and church
ministries in Nigeria, United Kingdom, Canada, and United States. She is a co-author of some
papers and books.

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Fantasy
Safety Goals

Rules
Games
Competition

Activity
Decision- Collaboration
Making

Figure 1 Different uses of games.

Figure 2 Gamification marketing [6].

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Figure 3 The uses of gamification in marketing [7].

Figure 4 Starbucks incorporates real-life purchases into a gamification method [9].

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