Gamify Your Recognition & Incentive Programs

Games are the second most frequent Internet activity for Americans after social networks; spending an estimated 906 million hours per month on social networks, 407 million on games and only 329 million on email.

By 2015, more than 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will “gamify” those processes.  A gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook by 2014.

So who is the gaming demographic?

-       50% of gamers are now female

-       30% over 45 years old

-       40 million active social gamers in the U.S.

-       200 million gamers on Facebook

This has great implications for loyalty marketing strategies, and provides an opportunity to “attract, cultivate and retain brand enthusiasts” according to Loyalty 360.

The goal of game dynamics ties perfectly into a recognition and incentive programs’ structures – to drive a user-desired behavior predictably.  As performance improvement companies, like FUSION, look for new ways to change behavior, gamification provides the perfect opportunity to tap into those psychological triggers.

For gamification to work, players must be given three things:  (1) a motivation to do something, (2) the ability to complete the action and (3) a trigger (cue) to complete the action.  Timing the trigger appropriately is crucial for the predictable behavior and makes the individual feel good about doing it.

FUSION has created an innovative gaming platform for one client that allows its “players” all over the world to participate in productive learning and showcases the clients products with points-based rewards motivating the channels to continue proactively participating and improving processes.

Reference:  Johnson, Mark.  “Gamification is More Than Just Fun and Games.”  June 2011, http://www.loyalty360.org/state_of_the_industry/gamification_is_more_than_just_fun_and_games/.