Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests

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Product Description

Harness the power of games to create extraordinary customer engagement with Game-Based Marketing.

Gamification is revolutionizing the web and mobile apps.

Innovative startups like Foursquare and Swoopo, growth companies like Gilt and Groupon and established brands like United Airlines and Nike all agree: the most powerful way to create and engage a vibrant community is with game mechanics. By leveraging points, levels, badges, challenges, rewards and leaderboards – these innovators are dramatically lowering their customer acquisition costs, increasing engagement and building sustainable, viral communities.

Game-Based Marketing unlocks the design secrets of mega-successful games like Zynga’s Farmville, World of Warcraft, Bejeweled and Project Runway to give you the power to create winning game-like experiences on your site/apps. Avoid obvious pitfalls and learn from the masters with key insights, such as:

• Why good leaderboards shouldn’t feature the Top 10 players.
• Most games are played as an excuse to socialize, not to achieve.
• Status is worth 10x more than cash to most consumers.
• Badges are not enough: but they are important.
• You don’t need to offer real-world prizing to run a blockbuster sweepstakes.

And learn even more:

• How to architect a point system that works
• Designing the funware loop: the basics of points, badges, levels, leaderboards and challenges
• Maximizing the value and impact of badges
• Future-proofing your design
• Challenging users without distraction

Based on the groundbreaking work of game expert and successful entrepreneur Gabe Zichermann, Game-Based Marketing brings together the game mechanics expertise of a decade’s worth of research. Driven equally by big companies, startups, 40-year-old men and tween girls, the world is becoming increasingly more fun.

Are you ready to play?

Amazon.com Review

Advertising is dead. You may not realize it, but you and everyone you know engages, possibly unsuspectingly, in some form of a game multitasking as an ingenious marketing device. Game-Based Marketing illustrates the pervasiveness of games today in business marketing, and how to better use them to create an engaged and loyal customer base. Game-Based Marketing will:

• Explain the growing phenomenon of game-based marketing and how it works
• Show marketers how to develop games to incorporate into their marketing strategy
• Share fascinating examples of marketing games already in play including Jigsaw.com; Chase Picks Up The Tab; the iconic McDonald’s Monopoly Game that reportedly generates nearly one-hundred million dollars in incremental revenue per year; and United Airlines Mileage Plus where team pint competitions and real-world scavenger hunts for miles accrue millions annually.

Provocative and instructive, Game-Based Marketing’s message is clear: Use the tools in this book to put games in your marketing mix now… or you’ll be out of the game altogether.

Top 5 Ways to Gameify Your Business

From Foursquare on the iPhone to an online game of Farmville, not to mention the frequent fliers popularized in the Academy Award nominated film, Up in the Air, playing "everyday games" has become nothing short of a pop culture obsession. Driving unprecedented consumer engagement to smart brands like Chase and the US Army, loyalty programs and marketing games are marketing’s best bet for the future of advertising.

It’s easier than you think to bring the power of games to your business. Using the breakthrough lessons in Game-Based Marketing, you can start adding game mechanics to your marketing mix in 5 easy steps:

1. What consumer behavior are you trying to drive? Don’t just think about broad or bottom line objectives (“more engagement”, “greater brand exposure”) when considering ways in which you’d like to effect the behavior of your consumer base, but instead, focus in on easy-to-achieve activities that will have an overall impact on your bottom line. For example: incentivize the sending of product endorsements to friends. The more specific you can be, the easier it is to build game mechanics around. Some behaviors are best left un-incentivized, however, a topic we cover closely in Chapters 1 & 2.

2. Assign points to those behaviors. Think about how much value each of the behaviors has to your business and assign points to each action accordingly. Points should be weighed relatively, so if opening a new account is ten times more valuable than clicking on an advertiser’s link, make sure the point system reflects that reality. Want to learn more about just how point systems function? Check out Chapters 3 & 4.

3. Create a leaderboard to display points. Just like the Employee of the Month plaques at restaurants, create a socially-networked leaderboard that allows users to feel like they are accomplishing something relative to their friends and peers—A little encouragement goes a long way. You’ll find a plethora of leaderboard dos & don’ts in Chapter 4.

4. Develop challenges and message them. Just like Frequent Flyer promotions, creating simple challenges can have a profound effect on user behavior once they are connected to your community. Keep your challenges fresh and topical by knowing your players – Chapter 7 gives you riveting insight on exactly who is playing.

5. Make “fun” your goal! Whether your business is finance or funerary, making fun a principal objective will substantially increase consumer engagement and generate remarkable new revenue opportunities. Chapter 8 shows you the future and how Generation G – today’s tweens – are driving ‘funnovation’ in every industry.

There are plenty more tips in store – from why cash, or even real-world prizes just don’t matter as much as you think, to how you can compete against well-funded incumbents without much capital. Buy Game-Based Marketing today and learn the key secrets of leading-edge marketers - and how you can harness the power of games in your mix to create, engage, and excite your customers.

Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests Reviews

Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests Reviews

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Average Customer Review

 ( 25 customer reviews)

25 Reviews

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2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful: Good concept, poorly executed, December 4, 2010 By  Ms. J. Anne Lees "bookrunner" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews    Amazon Verified Purchase( What's this?) This review is from: Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hardcover) I am totally on board with the authors' main concept, which is why it was so frustrating to try and read this book. From start to finish it is poorly written and edited, overly verbose when it could be much clearer and to the point, and nauseatingly vague on important details. For example, it dives into frequent flyer programs without clearly saying what they are, presents grandiose visions of how Facebook could be improved by a leaderboard, and seems to think Starbucks branches have a VIP lane. Plus it keeps using the awful term "Funware" to describe all this. Throughout, tantalising references are made to interesting concepts or events -- the Microsoft commercial, Flyertalk, Nike+ -- and either assume outright the reader is familiar with these, or provide little followup information for the reader to find out more. Even the section on Richard Bartle, the deity of player characterisation, was poor - lifted straight from Bartle's work with little original... Read more Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink   Comment 9 of 9 people found the following review helpful: Repetitive, Elementary, November 30, 2010 By  Richard Benci - See all my reviews This review is from: Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hardcover) Good concept, really poorly written. The author wastes our time by trying to associate his own trademarked "Funware" name with anything resembling gaming mechanics past and present (including incentive programs that were used before he was even born, such as the Boy Scouts, Mary Kay and S&H Green Stamps). Overly repetitive use of Frequent Flyer Programs, and very little useful information on using game-based marketing in a non-game entity. I really thought it would show how e-commerce, media, or product companies could deploy game mechanics to create a better user experience. Gaming Mechanics and Game Dynamics are important to understand, unfortunately, this book doesn't help one bit. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink   Comment (1) 5 of 5 people found the following review helpful: Just the basics, September 10, 2010 By  Melle Gloerich (Netherlands) - See all my reviews Amazon Verified Purchase( What's this?) This review is from: Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hardcover) I agree with Susan Diamond and 'The big shmoo' in that this book just touches the basics and is quite repetitive in using Frequent Flyer Programs as the perfect example of game-based marketing. I'm now reading 'The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses' by Jesse Schell and although it's a much tougher note to crack it is waaaay better in giving you inspiration in using games for marketing or communities. If you decide to do anything with games you need a more in depth book anyway, so you might as well skip this book because the contents will be covered in the first chapter of every book about games. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink   Comment

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