Why gamification could be the answer to your marketing woes?

DELEVAL Marie

RICARD Benjamin

For the time being, it is obvious that the online market is the winner face to the offline market. In term of data mainly. Indeed, online brands can catch consumer habits, and stimulate consumption by targeting advertising or emailing. But in fact, in 2015, only 27% of all retail transaction were made online. It would seem that the offline market is still the main market, where marketers have to catch customer’s attention and data. As we are going to explain below, smartphones could be the best way for marketers to involve the crowd by using their smartphone in order to stimulate the brand image and consumption. For instance, Mc Donald’s used the gamification of Pokemon GO to surf on by selling poke balls in theirs shops.

Currents problems: catch data offline in real time.

As explained in the article, “offline is a big blindspot”, in term of data in real time but also in term of sales team. Indeed, brand offline is only represented by sales forces, and collecting data on it takes too much time, and is not efficient enough. If sales forces go and collect data at one moment, when he comes back to the central office data collected will be wrong. So samples collected are really not representative. Data collection in real time could be a great opportunity for business to understand and know brand integrity in the street or which type of consumers buy or get in the shop and why. Only the loyalty card can track consumer’s activity today. In the article, for example, they explain that MSC cruise has used crowd and their opinion, in order to improve quality and sells in partner agencies. That is to say that they can collect thanks to the crowd in real time a picture of their poster in the partner’s windows.

To sum up what are the main disadvantages of current method to gather offline data, we could say that: On one hand, samples are not representatives, given that there are too many people and shops for companies to gather a large amount of data on the spot. On the other hand, it takes time to travel and to gather this data, which implies a lack of “updated” data.

Why smartphones and gamification can be considered as a solution to this offline data problem?

Based on this statement, companies have realized that Smartphones do represent a really efficient tool to help them to gather data on their offline businesses. Indeed, as it still represents a major part of retail transactions (73%), collecting a complete and real-time data about physical places can have an important impact on firms’ marketing strategy. The main reasons why Smartphone is seen as a solution is that: First, most of people do own a Smartphone nowadays (3 out of 4 adults in the UK). When it comes to gather a complete data, this is a useful statistic, as companies can ask people through their smartphone about their feeling on offline shops. For instance, camera is one of the most concrete and complete data that companies can collect through the crowd, given that it shows exactly what is happening right there and right now. Moreover, the data collected is a real-time data, that can enable companies to react faster, and to adapt their marketing strategy to what is happening just at the moment. For example, MSC Cruises has already used this kind of data collection method, which enabled the company “to segment their approach to sending the marketing materials so it was much more effective and less wasteful.” (Before, too much small windows of some travel agencies had made impossible the attachment of the posters, so it was a waste of materials and time).

Conclusion

To put it in a nutshell, this article caught our attention given that it was dealing with topics we are sensitive to. Indeed, Smartphone is a tool we use every single day, and we found really interested the fact of using this tool to serve marketing strategy of companies. But what we found even more clever is the way companies encourage the crowd to help them to gather data, with gamification. From a user perspective, this is a concept that makes the crowd forget the real purpose, that is to say to collect complete and real-time data, in order to adapt their business strategy.