Press Start. Using gamification to power-up your marketing, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Press Start Using gamification to power-up your marketing. By: Daniel Griffin, Albert van der Meer. Available from Bloomsbury here.

Do you know someone obsessed with a mobile game like Candy Crush? Have you ever felt a rush when you completed a task… and perhaps another when you crossed it off your to-do list? Or maybe you have that one running-obsessed friend who has to log everything on their fitness app?

The fact is, these obsessions and ‘highs’ affect all of us, and they can be powerful drivers in terms of how we behave. In an increasingly commoditized world, marketers are always looking for new ways to influence or motivate us to be better engaged with their products, services, and brands. This is marketing gamification: the practice of taking the motivational elements of games (like challenges, achievements and teams) and applying them intelligently in real-life situations to improve engagement and performance.

With many success stories from the likes of LinkedIn, Delta Airlines, Starbucks, and Duolingo, marketing gamification is already a well-established practice, but many businesses are wary of jumping in without a guide – especially as there have been so many high-profile failures.

Written specifically for marketing professionals, Press Start explores the benefits and uses of gamification, and ties together motivational psychology and case studies with popular game mechanics and design principles. More importantly, the book will provide readers with a step-by-step guide for successfully designing their own marketing gamification solutions.

Press Start. Using gamification to power-up your marketing, reviewed

This book does cover some interesting ideas, but, before delving into those, it does also raise some important higher level questions, which is chooses not to address. If we consider what a previous round of gamification resulted in, and we’re thinking of those waves of seemingly innocuous personality tests that swamped Facebook for a long time. These turned out to be the massive, unauthorised and deeply unethical landgrab of people’s behaviour, personalities, that was then was effectively, and illegally exploited by Cambridge Analytica.

As always there is never any such thing as a free lunch, and gamification, or manipulating humans via anthropological insights and analysis of their behaviours may bring you short term games for your marketing campaigns. But at what costs to our wider civil society in the longer run. Even within a marketing context, if you gamify things now, when the impact of this dies down, as it always inevitably does, well what comes next? What, more drastic actions and activities will you need to carry out to capture people’s attention from some other site, aiming to be stickier than your one?

This book is thorough in terms of the strategies and approaches it describes, but there seems to be little in terms of an evaluation of the ethical implications of this strategy, nor the potential long term impacts of it either.

See more reviews here.

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