I by IMD Book Club
Gaming
Create a place for your customers to play
Gaming has become one of the world’s most powerful consumer ecosystems. Stefan Michel explores why every company now needs a strategy for play to stay competitive. ...
Gaming has become one of the world’s most powerful consumer ecosystems. Stefan Michel explores why every company now needs a strategy for play to stay competitive.
Gaming is no longer a niche hobby – it has become a critical arena in the battle for consumer attention.
Speaking at a recent IMD Book Club, Solsten co-founder Bastian Bergmann shared insights from his book Press Play: Why Every Company Needs a Gaming Strategy, which explains why gaming has become such a powerful tool for reaching and engaging today’s consumers.
Today’s consumers, he says, demand more than products; they crave immersive, personalized experiences. As a result, traditional marketing and engagement strategies have lost their edge. The new frontier? Gaming, where close to three and a half billion people worldwide spend their time, attention, and money.
The book unpacks how Burberry and other legendary companies, like Peloton and The New York Times, are building deeper, more loyal relationships with their customers through video games.
Burberry, for example, partnered with Mythical Games to integrate its latest collection into the video game Blankos – and the results were immediate. “Twenty-two seconds. That’s how long it took the brand to engage a digital-first audience with radically different preferences and shopping behaviors than its current customers,” Bergmann said.
To play is human
What exactly is the definition of gaming? Is it the online chess game I play, or the types of games my daughter plays that require an expensive computer with the latest Nvidia graphics card? What about the word games my colleagues play religiously?
According to Bergmann, it is all of the above.
He explains that when we talk about the gaming opportunity, the knee-jerk reaction of many marketers is to conjure up an image of an 18-year-old dude in a basement with neon lights, drinking a Monster energy drink, and playing a shooting game, leading them to invariably declare, “This is not for us.”
The reality is that this youngster represents a tiny percentage of the world’s gaming population. Breaking that stereotype, says Bergmann, is the most important first step towards understanding the enormity of the gaming opportunity.
“To play is one of the most human things we can do,” he said. “Gaming is simply the digital manifestation of the concept of play. It is through play that we learn and engage, and this is why it makes it such a powerful marketing tool.”
Bergmann believes that every company should consider gaming as part of its strategy because every company interacts with humans, either as customers, suppliers, or employees. What makes gaming different from other forms of entertainment, and so powerful, is that it requires bidirectional activity – an action and a reaction – which creates immersion, something every marketer is desperate for in a world where there are so many things competing for our attention.
I am always blown away by the number of my colleagues who have made playing the games it offers, like Wordle, Spelling Bee, and its crossword, part of their daily routine.
How to go about developing your gaming strategy
Bergmann was spurred to write the book because he realized that most companies, even those that already wanted to make gaming a core part of their digital strategies, didn’t understand how to take full advantage of this enormous opportunity.
For most, it was merely about extending their existing marketing approach to the virtual world; sponsoring an e-sports team, for example, or putting their name on a billboard in Grand Theft Auto. He is not against this approach, but his aim in writing Press Play is to build bridges between non-endemics and the gaming world to move beyond brand awareness and enable companies to take full advantage of what this world provides.
The book provides a strategic framework for how to go about developing your gaming strategy by outlining the various options at a company’s disposal, including how to integrate your brand into a game that already exists, as Disney just did with The Simpsons in Fortnite, or build your own game venture, which Chipotle has done through its branded gaming experiences on Roblox.
Web3 games, which use blockchain to let players truly own their in-game items, provide a whole new opportunity as they enable consumers to sell, trade, or resell items outside of the game, just like real-world assets.
This is the opportunity Burberry took advantage of when it sold 750 limited edition characters at $300 each in just 22 seconds, giving the company continuous brand exposure and interaction with a whole new generation of customers.
Another strategy – which Bergmann says is probably the least obvious, but which has proved hugely beneficial for the companies that have successfully implemented it – is to make the game a part of your product. This is illustrated in the story of Peloton, whose game Lane Break enables its customers to do their workouts by playing a game as opposed to watching the company’s instructor-led content.
According to Bergmann, the customers who play the game use their bikes more often and for longer, illustrating the power of games to drive customer engagement and retention.
For me, the book’s New York Times example was fascinating. I am always blown away by the number of my colleagues who have made playing the games it offers, like Wordle, Spelling Bee, and its crossword, part of their daily routine.
Today, the company’s games are a key entry point for new subscribers, many of whom are only then exposed to the company’s traditional offerings – including news, sports, and cooking. This is an excellent example of how games have become a significant channel for attracting and retaining subscribers for this media and publishing company, a sector that has been under intense pressure for the last 15 years.
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