Strengthening Brand Loyalty Through Gameplay

By Steve Penhollow

Gamification is the opposite of workification. Neither term is considered a word by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, but the latter is even less of a word than the former — because I just made it up.

Workification is the gradual process by which the pastimes you loved as a kid turn into drudgery. If you don’t think that’s a term for an actual thing, you must still be a kid.

Gamification, according to blogger Zac Fitz-Walter, was coined first in 2003 by British programmer and inventor Nick Pelling.

As defined by Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham in their 2011 book, Gamification by Design, gamification is the “use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems.”

When Foursquare gave up its badge-earning system in 2014, many pundits claimed it signaled the end of gamification.

The idea that an onerous task might be made more pleasant and palatable by the introduction of game elements is nothing new.

Some bloggers and technology writers might want to pretend that the birth of gamification as a concept roughly coincided with the birth of the personal computer. But educators started experimenting with learning games (and with flashy rather than ephemeral rewards) many decades before the advent of the PC.

The phrase “you’ve earned a gold star” comes from the practice in many elementary schools from the ’50s through the ’70s of incentivizing students with stickers. So the phrase “star pupil” may have had more to do initially with sticker accumulation than educational celebrity.

In the marketing realm, the S&H Green Stamp program was the most popular customer loyalty or customer rewards program from the ’30s to the ’70s. The stamps were sold by the Sperry & Hutchinson Company to grocers, gas stations and retailers who would then give them out to their customers after purchases had been made. The stamps could be collected into books and then redeemed for prizes, some of them quite grand. The pasting of the stamps and the collection of the books resembled a family gaming activity. Whenever a kid at an arcade redeems tickets won playing Skee-Ball for prizes, he is paying unwitting homage to the S&H Green Stamp program.

Zichermann has said that gamification in marketing is just a logical extension of predigital loyalty and rewards programs.

Margaret Robinson of the defunct design studio Hide & Seek wrote that many gamification apps and programs just aren’t enough like games: “That problem being that gamification isn’t gamification at all. What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience.”

Like every other marketing effort in the digital sphere, gamification comes down to authenticity.

Points and badges, she wrote, “have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game.”

When Foursquare — the social networking and location-broadcasting service that was formerly one of the most prominent and oft-cited champions of gamification — gave up its badge-earning system in 2014, many pundits claimed it signaled the end of gamification.

While Foursquare’s move bewildered some people, marketing professional Oliver Stedall came up with the likeliest of explanations on his blog. Stedall believes that when some users became bored with Foursquare’s game elements, they gave up, even though the game elements were not the core of the service. The game elements had become a distraction from the brand more than a fortification of it.

“Foursquare need check-ins to power their service,” he wrote, “so they need to ensure that users keep checking in. To combat the problem of user drop-off from gamification, they are taking the necessary step to try and change the reasons people choose to check in.”