4 Mistakes not to Make in Gamification
An Interview With Scott Schnaars
Scott Schnaars
General Manager, EMEA
Badgeville
Gamification is a hugely promising area which has already shown some incredible results when it
has been implemented. It is, however, a new area to most and so it is important not to make
mistakes that could jeopardise the implementation of gamification. We spoke with Scott Schnaars
General Manager, EMEA, Badgeville about this and he gave us 4 mistakes that he has seen
companies making. He also describes the keys to a successful implementation and the potential
benefits of altering a customer's behaviour with gamification
Gerald Clarke:
Scott, could you briefly give us your definition of gamification?
Scott Schnaars:
I think that a lot of people… the standard definition, of course,
is, we're going to take some elements out of the game and apply them into a non-game
experience, which I think is a great 101 definition. At Badgeville, though, we take a
little bit of a different cast on that because we don't believe that that's all that
actionable. We talk a lot about the story of advancement and how do you drive
consumers to advance their particular experience.
So when we think about our definition of gamification what we're thinking about is
making a customer experience more personalised and rewarding by influencing key
behaviours along that consumer's journey and helping tell the story of advancement,
so that they can participate even more inside of that brand experience.
Clarke:
What are the potential benefits of changing the customer's behaviour
with gamification?
Schnaars:
I think obviously it's good for business and I think what we try to do
with our clients is we try to do three things. We want to help our customers get more
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4 Mistakes not to Make in Gamification
An Interview With Scott Schnaars
customers themselves. Once they have those customers we want them to do more
things and that could be anything from sharing content with my social group,
watching videos, I'm writing reviews, I'm leaving testimonials. And then ultimately
we want to, we want those customers to buy more stuff, but we want to be very
cautious not to be a solely transactional loyalty programme.
The social behaviours that people do, the non-transactional behaviours that people do,
have a tremendous amount of value associated with them, as well. It's important to
think about, let's use this as an acquisition strategy, as a way to get those people to do
those non-transactional behaviours, as well as to do transactional behaviours. And
what we find is that when you drive those three elements that really has a significant
impact on the business and really helps our customers drive positive return on
investment.
Clarke:
What is important for the successful implementation of gamification?
Schnaars:
Like anything, Gerald, I think that the experience, the user experience,
is really key. I… you want to be cautious not to make it insulting. And you want to
make sure that you tell the story that your users want to hear and that your users want
to be part of. And I think that you want to be cautious not to make it too gamey. I
think that there is this inherent - when people hear the word gamification opportunity to say, let's just turn everything into a game. And that's not something
that we would endorse because it's a really hard thing to do.
Clarke:
What are some of the mistakes that you see companies making in their
gamification?
Schnaars:
I think that it's four things. I think that there… this is not easy. The
reason that Gardner came out and said that the vast majority of gamified experiences
are going to fail is because it's a difficult thing. It's a merger of technology and
psychology used to influence the way the customers behave. What I would say that
when I think about those four key mistakes, one, I think that people focus too much
on what is fun for the designer. And fun is a word that I have, that I oftentimes have a
real problem with, because something that might be fun for me isn't necessarily going
to be fun for you. And when you have an audience of 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 or a
million people, trying to design an experience that's fun for that many people is a
really challenging thing to do.
The second thing, and riding on that, is that people fail when they try to make it too
much about a game versus influencing behaviour. I think that Candy Crush and
Angry Birds, while they are great games, are also a one in every couple of years
breakout hit. The odds of a brand replicating the success of that and creating a social
game or creating a sticky game like one of those two titles, the odds of them
replicating that success is bleak at best.
The third thing that I think, the third mistake that I see people making is that they
focus too much on competition and not enough on influencing the behaviour. The
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4 Mistakes not to Make in Gamification
An Interview With Scott Schnaars
idea of competition doesn't necessarily appeal to a very large audience. There are
some scenarios, Call of Duty, X-Box achievements, those kinds of things, where
competition becomes a big driver for people. But I think that if you look at a true,
traditional loyalty programme competition is not necessarily inherently part of that. If
you have a solo experience having a competitive motivator is not going to drive
anybody, just like with the airline mileage. I don't care how many miles you have,
you don't care how many miles I have.
And then the fourth thing is that I think people tend to focus too much on the short
term and not enough on the long term. I oftentimes see customers of mine, when we
have our initial discussion they think about, we want to create this experience, and
they spell it out for you and the experience only lasts about two weeks. And the
challenge with that is two weeks from now you're going to be back in the same boat
redesigning a whole new experience to get your consumers to engage again. What we
do is we look at how long does a consumer engage and oftentimes you might find that
a customer might be an advocate of a brand for 24, 36 months, maybe even five years;
it doesn't make sense to have a short-term experience to drive their behaviour just for
a couple of weeks. Let's think about how do we influence that person's behaviour to
make them do more things, buy more stuff, influence their friends' behaviour over the
course of that two, three, five year class experience.
Clarke:
What are the current trends in this area? And how do you think it will
change in the coming 18 months?
Schnaars:
I think there's… man, I wish I had a crystal ball for that. I think that
where things are going is that this is absolutely going to get smarter. One of the
things that we're starting to see now is that ultimately what gamification is all about is
the big data play. So now I have a tremendous amount of data that say beyond,
Gerald, because you've bought this product other people who bought this product
might like this thing. What we're now able to do is take all that data and say because
you have exhibited this behaviour this is the cohort that you fall into. And we can
start to be a little bit more predictive about things that you might want to buy based on
what your behaviours are and not just from one thing that you purchased. I think that
that's one area where this is absolutely going.
I think that another area is going to be around universal profiles. And we're starting to
see this with a lot of our customers now is that I'm able to take my profile from one
brand, let's use, I'm a big software company, and leverage that into, I'm a big
hardware company. And because I have this high reputation inside of the software
company that reputation can carry over into the hardware company.
I think that there're going to be some opportunities where it's less about games and
less about game mechanic and more about just general messaging. As this becomes
smarter it'll start to anticipate and guide based on your previous behaviours. And
that's where I was going with the first point, as well, is that if you have exhibited a
certain amount of behaviour let's put you on a path that takes you down route A
versus just this open field where you could go off and go do anything. We want to be
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4 Mistakes not to Make in Gamification
An Interview With Scott Schnaars
very controlling in terms of what your experience is like in order to ensure that you
have the best customer experience.
If you would like to know more about this topic and the Enterprise Gamification
Europe event on the 26th and 27th of March in London, England, visit our website, at
www.EnterpriseGamificationEurope.com
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