Gamification started in 1895 when S&H Green Stamps sold stamps to retailers who used them to reward customers for their loyalty. Since then, many companies have used gamification internally or externally. Today we are sharing three real examples of how companies engaged and motivated their customers, teams, etc.
Chiquita Brands
The first case study is Chiquita Brands.
Everyone knows Chiquita for bananas, but Chiquita Brands is a consumer food products supplier for fresh and processed fruit and vegetable products. Partnered with Twentieth Century Fox to promote the animation movie Rio, they used gamification to drive consumer engagement. The concept was to create a marketing campaign designed to engage customers of a consumer’s package goods brand and build a relationship with them. In terms of business goals, Chiquita wanted to increase brand awareness, favourability, and interest in their products. Therefore, with the marketing agency MediaMarketing, Chiquita built the “Make Your Way to Rio” website. According to Scoot Facheux, North America consumer marketing manager at Chiquita Brands the website was “an engaging online playground for our Chiquita Banana consumer where the whole family could share in the fun of Chiquita-branded products, the film Rio and win great prizes including tasty Chiquita bananas and other nutritious products“. Consumers who signed onto the site received a virtual passport which they could fill up with banana sticker “badges” by accomplishing goals throughout the site, including watching movie clips, sharing recipes, playing games, and reviewing product information (Paharia, 2013). With specific game mechanics like fast feedback, transparency, goals, badges, collaboration, community, and points, Chiquita Brands managed to collect data like user activity, content preferences, product preferences, social-media sharing. Through gamification, Chiquita increased engagement, page views, visits, and additional customers and customer data in the marketing database.
Warner Bros.
Movie studios have always had a problem building a direct relationship with consumers. To connect the company directly with its consumers and rewarding consumers for watching and buying the studio´s products, Warner Bros. launched Insider Rewards, a loyalty program. The Warner Bros. Insider Rewards loyalty program had two currencies you could earn. Points were earned for purchases – buying DVDs, movie tickets, digital downloads, and so on. Points could be redeemed for more of the same kinds of dollar-value items. But the company also added a second currency called Credits, which were earned for visiting movie sites, playing games, sharing to social networks, and so on (Paharia, 2013). With specific gamification mechanics like fast feedback, transparency, levelling up and points, Warner Bros. managed to get customers to buy more. Drive brand engagement and affinity with Warner Bros. as well as the individual movie properties. Increase viral sharing and audience growth. Develop deeper customer intimacy and knowledge. Through gamification, Warner Bros. increased engagement, page views, visits, and additional customers and customer data in the marketing database.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a customer relationship management solution that brings companies and customers together. Sometimes it is difficult to engage and motivate employees. In this case, Salesforce needed an automated, scalable way to motivate salespeople to want to adopt SFA (salesforce automation) systems, keep data quality high, and drive ongoing use. To address this situation, an application, called Nitro was built for Salesforce. It consumes the user-activity data that salesforce.com generate, while sales professionals are using it and use that data to motivate “good” behaviour. Salespeople earn points for closing deals, advancing opportunities, hitting their quota early, collaborating, maintaining good data quality, following approved sales processes, and any other behaviour that the sales manager wants to drive. They can then spend those points in a reward store for tangible or intangible rewards at the discretion of the sales manager. And as they hit various point thresholds, they level up and earn even more points as well as access to new goals (Paharia, 2013). With specific gamification mechanics like fast feedback, transparency, goals, badges, levelling up, onboarding, competition, collaboration, community and points, Salesforce was able to improve their competitive advantage from better sales insights and performance. Through gamification, Salesforce increased adoption and use of sales force automation tools, increased average deal size, lead closure rates, data quality, annual revenue and decreased average sales cycle and rep time-to-productivity.
As you could see, gamification can engage, motivate and reward loyal customers or employees. Gamification can do wonderful things in a corporate environment and can be a great platform to engage customers too. With specific game mechanics, gamification motivates customers to buy more and employees to be more productive, and happy.
