The business value of gamification: 5 tips for success and 2 pathways to failure

5 tips for success

• Look beyond engagement

Despite being the most widely used performance metric, focusing on engagement as an end in itself tends to be counterproductive. Focusing narrowly on engagement without a clear sense of how the game will add strategic value often brings difficulties.

• Define the strategic objectives

Different goals (customer acquisition, expansion, refining market positioning) call for different design elements. Once you know your objectives, give designers and engineers a clear brief and choose the right KPIs to gauge success.

• Align design with strategic objectives

For instance, if the desired strategic outcome is user lock-in, one route to success is to design a game featuring social comparison based on desirable user identities while excluding tangible rewards. But if the goal is to shape users’ values and beliefs, the game needs to hold their attention over the long term (for example, through engagement in virtual worlds and social comparison).

• Choose KPIs to reflect strategic objectives

Choosing the right KPIs will prevent the project from being led astray by ‘nice-to-have’ wins that are irrelevant to your strategic goal. (For example, if you want to gain market share by selling more to existing users, focus on the number of new users the game attracts.)

• Don’t try it all in the name of experimentation

One of the mantras in the digital arena is that success often requires experimentation and numerous iterations to achieve optimal results. While there’s some truth in this, our analysis suggests that ‘trying it all’ is counter-productive and associated with failure.

2 pathways to failure

• Neglecting all three critical factors

There are three critical design features of games (virtualization, social comparisons, and tangible rewards). Neglecting to incorporate any of these features in the project is a sure pathway to failure.

• Incorporating undesirable social identities

Incorporating undesirable social identities and attempting to promote them will cause gamification to fail, regardless of which other features are incorporated: users will not buy into social identities or comparisons they do not like or cannot relate to.