Five Lessons that Marketers Can Learn from Wordle
From universal accessibility to spoiler-free sharing, Wordle’s viral success is a masterclass in cutting through the noise
From Tiger King to sourdough, every spike of the Covid-19 pandemic seems to come with its own defining viral phenomenon. In this Omicron era, that honor has fallen onto a humble word-guessing game called Wordle.
If you’ve been online for even an hour during the past two weeks, you’ve probably encountered either social media posts made up of green and yellow blocks or think-pieces talking about the game. Given that you clicked on this article, it seems safe to assume that you have been curious enough to figure out what Wordle is, or maybe even played it yourself. So I won’t waste time explaining what it is.
Things go viral on the internet for no good reason all the time, but Wordle is quite a peculiar case that is worth spending some time thinking about. From a marketing standpoint, analyzing the drivers behind Wordle’s organic viral success provides a fascinating look into how to generate buzz, cultivate a fandom, and achieve the escape velocity needed to break out in the age of digital noise and abundance.
Here are the five main takeaways that marketers can glean from Wordle:
1. Small Victories in Trying Times
We are all collectively going through this prolonged pandemic, and we could all use a win every once in a while. While Wordle may seem intimidating at first — there are so many five-letter words in the English language to choose from! — it is designed as an “agency-expanding game” where the players feel increasingly empowered and closer to the goal as they play, mainly through the process of elimination.
In other words, Wordle is just difficult enough to make you feel smart and prompt a dose of dopamine when you sleuth out the right answer, but not too difficult for most people to play. And since there’s only one Wordle puzzle a day, you don’t have to spend too much time on it, yet it is highly habit-forming. In these trying times, who wouldn’t welcome a daily small victory?
For brand marketers, this collective need for small daily victories points to the opportunities in creating simple, user-friendly experiences that reward and delight your customers on a regular basis without demanding too much efforts. Whether it’s loyalty points or exclusive access, there are many tools that brands can use to reward your customers and keep them engaged.
2. Universal Accessibility in a Fragmented Landscape
Another unique thing about Wordle is that, unlike many viral games that came before, it is not an app. Instead, Wordle is a web-based game that anyone can easily access from any internet connected device that has a browser. Regardless of which device you use, the user experience stays consistently simple and hassle-free. The game is usually just one click away, whether through a link in a group chat message or a hyperlink in the many articles that have been written about the game since it went viral.
Wordle’s universal accessibility undoubtedly aided its viral spread, which is especially effective in today’s fragmented consumer technology landscape. The tragedy of “making a Spotify playlist for your crush, only to find out that he’s an Apple Music user” is unfortunately far too common these days. Android users had no easy access to Clubhouse until months after it first blew up in early 2021, and Apple users had no way to download Fortnite on their iOS devices for nearly a year. In this age of polarization and division, Wordle’s platform-agnostic accessibility is a refreshing change that brings everyone together.
A major part of brand marketing often boils down to getting your brand message out there, and if it’s a mass audience that you’re after, then easy, universal access should be a top priority in designing your brand experience. Granted, Wordle works as a web-based game thanks to its simplicity, and the more elaborate experiences would usually work better with apps. But then, the question for brands remains: why go for the more sophisticated option when a simpler, more accessible one would be just as effective? Most branded apps are under-used anyway, and 91% of consumers hate being forced to download an app in order to access brand experiences. So, unless you’re targeting a passionate niche audience that wouldn’t mind a bit of upfront investment to figure out the onboarding process, it is best to keep things simple and easily accessible.
3. Made for Sharing, but Not Spoiling
Every game and online experience today comes with a social sharing button, and Wordle is no exception. Word of mouth on social media is a key to its viral buzz, but what separates Wordle from other shareable games lies in how its social sharing is designed. Instead of sending a screenshot of the results to social media, as many games today tend to do, Wordle has found an elegant solution, making use of color-block emojis, for players to easily share the process of their daily games without giving away the answer. The end result is visually distinctive and somewhat cryptic, which means that it may just intrigue some people to stop scrolling and figure out what it is.
We are now over a decade into the “Spoiler Culture” era, where sharing anything in pop culture has to come with its own “spoiler alert” warnings. Yet, quite contradictorily, the speed at which our cultural discourse moves has only been accelerating, which means the shelf life of spoilers is getting shorter and shorter. For anyone who has an active online life, this creates an almost unhealthy urgency to keep up with the latest in pop culture, lest you get spoiled accidentally while others have moved on to the next hot topic.
Of course, some marketers would welcome this type of spoiler-avoidant urgency to drive buzz, but it is also important to consider how social sharing by early adopters makes the rest of your audience feel. The distinct yet cryptic aesthetic of Wordle’s color-blocks results is memorable, and it also alludes to a vague sense of insider knowledge that triggers our innate social need to be “in the know.” For brands, striking a balance between accessibility and mystery requires careful consideration and strategizing in designing how your branded content is shared online. To be considerate to your next customer while satisfying the bragging rights of your existing customers should not be mutually exclusive.
4. Learning from Fans in the Age of Co-Creation
Interestingly, Wordle’s cleverly designed social sharing feature stems from a fan’s contribution. According to The Guardian’s profile on Wordle creator Josh Wardle:
“The game really took off when one user in New Zealand (where the game is especially popular) displayed her results in a sequence of emojis on Twitter, prompting Wardle to build a function that would allow users to share theirs more easily, in a visually appealing Rubik’s Cube-style grid configuration.”
In today’s creator economy, online marketing is a two-way street. Your audiences have the tools to be creative, and they will use those tools to make their voice heard if needed. Unboxing videos and makeup tutorials have long been influencer staples, but the audience feedback often goes far beyond sponsored content. Instead of tightly controlling the brand image and messaging, which is increasingly a fool’s errand, a better route may be to lean into the collaborative spirit of the internet and invite fans to be your co-creators and ambassadors. After all, there is no stronger incentive for loyalty than a sense of pride and ownership in their creative output to keep your fans engaged.
This emerging trend of co-creation will only intensify as we enter the web3 era, where digital creators will be empowered by blockchain technology to prove the provenance and ownership of their creative outputs, no matter how many meme iterations they went through. New micro-payment methods and social tokens enabled by the likes of cryptocurrencies and NFTs will provide new ways for creators to monetize their creations, thus supercharging the co-creation trend with economic incentives. In the web3 future, brands will have to work with their biggest fans and give them the credit they deserve, or else risk irrelevance. So why not start to do so today?
5. The Art of Doing Less
Last but not least, Wordle owes much of its charming simplicity and viral success to the fact that its creator has no intention of monetizing the game, despite the millions of visits his website now gets every day. While this may come as a disappointment for some brands and ad buyers, it is an interesting departure from the “every viral moment must be monetized” mentality that has come to dominate our internet culture in recent years.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with monetizing attention, and not every creator can afford not to monetize their viral moments. Yet, the reputation that Josh Wardle has gained by choosing not to monetize his game is a trade-off that makes sense for him, and the millions of Wordle players are grateful to not be bombarded with ad banners or, worse, pop-up ads. There is no nefarious data collection to worry about, since Wordle doesn’t require any signups, and it is not designed to be addictive like many free-to-play mobile games tend to be, given that it only offers one puzzle per day.
Of course, there have been many copycats trying to capitalize on Wordle’s viral success with either ads and paid apps. Yet, Wordle’s refusal to engage with some of the worst instincts of the digital economy — over-monetization, intrusive data collection, and addictive designs of games and algorithms — makes it stand out and ensures it offers the best experience for its fans.
As digital marketers, it has become a strategic impulse for us to always want to learn more about our audiences and to try to hook them with gamified branded experiences. But Wordle’s success shows us that sometimes, less is more. Doing away with the more annoying aspects of digital marketing may result in a far superior user experience that is sure to delight people and get them talking.
