Relevance to Product: an Unstated Key Consideration in Game-Based Marketing

By | September 14, 2010

I was just talking with my friend Nick about the power and prevalance of game-based marketing, having read recently Gabe Zichermann’s and Joselin Linder’s book, Game-Based Marketing.  The ideas have been around for a long time, as the authors point out, and sometime later I will make a post with a more detailed review/commentary on their interesting points.

My conversation reminded me that one of the points I believe missed in that book, and one I see missed in general regarding games in marketing: successful game elements for product marketing really should focus on relevancy to the product.  I think frequent-flier programs hit the nail on the head because the point accumulation is directly tied to the flight/travel product.  I have made this point in previous posts, but I am capturing the thought more succinctly here as a metric: how relevant to the product is any game element being considered for us.  Similarly, the marketer has to ensure the experience (delivered through the elements) is relevant to the viewer/operator — that really is the same point we see a lot of people making about defining buyer personas (which I first read about from David Scott Meerman).

In summary, two critical points in making successful use of game elements to product marketing are:

  1. Making the game elements relevant to the product’s capability to solve real problems
  2. Make the overall experience relevant to the buyer’s/viewer’s problem and motivation.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *