How does engaging audiences, keeping score, and retaining talented team members come together? With “gamification,” a term coined in 2002 that is just recently gaining momentum. Gamification combines the concepts of game design with loyalty programs and behavioral economics to drive user engagement. Firms can use the gamification platform to target potential customers, employees, suppliers— or the entire industry with content, delivery, and rewards built accordingly.
Competitive Edge
If we consider that most ISSA Today readers are either in sales or senior management of their firms, then the majority of you are likely competitive. You want to win. Whether it is at fantasy football, a golf outing, a card game or a request for proposal (RFP)… when you are keeping score, it is important to you to come out on top! And while some of the above examples offer fun prizes, according to leading gamification expert Gabe Zichermann in his 2012 The Next Web conference presentation, what players really want, from stickiest to least sticky, is SAPS—status, access, power, and stuff. In other words, status, such as being at the top of a leaderboard, is more important to the people playing to win, than cash or free stuff. Similarly, access, such as backstage passes, and power, such as moderating a forum, fall in the middle on the SAPS value scale.
Now think about how this might apply to your team. As a distributor, rep firm, manufacturer, building service contractor, or in-house management do you have a hard time filling open positions with young, educated, and (for sales positions especially) aggressive candidates? If you do finally manage to get them onboard, are they shocked by your company’s lack of modern training systems and appropriate use of technology? (How many binders of print literature did your team come back with from their last factory training session?) If this is the case, are you really surprised when retention of young people is the next issue? And what about your loyal and experienced team members? Are they lacking in engagement and inspiration? Let’s define employee engagement as we’ll come back to this in a bit.
According to Forbes, engagement is “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals…engaged employees actually care about their work and their company…they use discretionary effort.” So have some of your seasoned sales people just lost their edge and become actively disengaged? Most American workers are actively disengaged and that leads to lower profit margins and higher turnover.
Last summer, we hosted a survey of your peers, which reinforced what we all know is obvious: attracting, training, and retaining talent is a major challenge in our industry. (Sales was the focus of our survey, but this is true elsewhere in our industry as well.) Gamification can add some fun and glamour to an otherwise occasionally unsexy industry!
Early Gamification
A few industry players have already deployed a form of gamification via social media events or campaigns, often reinforced with other more traditional marketing (email announcements, website links, etc.). In February/March 2014, the Andersen Co. featured “The Great Mat Search; Waterhog Mat Photo Contest.” Members of Anderson’s distributor base submitted photos directly onto the company’s Facebook page where followers were invited to vote for the best qualifying photo.
Another, similar, industry-related example of early gamification was a Facebook contest to find “America’s Biggest Hot Mess” hosted by Zep Manufacturing, Inc. This one asked contestants to post photos or videos of a messy room. The contestants were also judged on the story behind the “hot mess.” Players competed for numerous prizes, including professional cleaning services provided by Cleaning for a Reason.
The point of these contests is to engage customers and prospects in an exciting way that also provides “Likes,” “followers,” and best of all, community-driven content for the company’s social media venues.
Advanced Engagement
Another way to gamify is to use a game-based design to market and train your team members on product features and other industry information. A game-based, social, mobile learning platform can inspire distributor sales representatives, manufacturer representatives, BSCs, and in-house service providers to voluntarily spend discretionary time interacting with their mobile device to learn about their industry.
From the United States Air Force to the well-known research firm Aberdeen, there are numerous studies over the last five decades that demonstrate game-based learning benefits. From these studies, we found fun facts, such as the average gamer is a 43-year-woman. We also learned interesting insights, including that game-based learning is more effective than traditional learning, even with senior citizens.
Let’s face it… the Internet age and now the plethora of mobile devices has changed the entire way we learn. When board games became video games, the opportunity of engaging your audiences with gamification significantly increased. Technological advances simply enable processes to happen faster. Gamification hit viral mode more recently when it started being digitized and tracked. In a 2011 press release on the topic, the predictions are enlightening, “By 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes,” according to Gartner, Inc. “By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay, or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.”
A key to why gaming in all forms is so prevalent is basic neuroscience— dopamine, which dictionary.com defines as “a catecholamine neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, retina, and sympathetic ganglia, acting within the brain to help regulate movement and emotion…”
We’ve read a lot more about dopamine, and one consistency in our research is that dopamine is downright addicting. When one seeks challenge, and then achieves the challenge they set out for, the brain secretes this pleasure neurotransmitter. This drives the user/player onto a unique focus to achieve, over and over again, to trigger repeated dopamine release. So the next question is, how can we effectively harness dopamine to focus and sharpen our teams and our industry?
One answer is that all the big manufacturers can begin deploying their own gamification digital platforms. Like many of the digitized catalog apps created over the last three years to five years, these games will operate in a silo and serve a focused purpose for the manufacturer that invests in it. Once the platform is developed, populated, marketed, and deployed… it should retain the spotlight with some reps—until the next manufacturer rolls one out and/or the next generation of smartphones makes it obsolete. That’s a large investment and an ongoing commitment to investing, as the platforms will need to stay fresh to stay relevant.
However, consider the industry-wide benefit of a cooperative program, where resources could be pooled to keep the platform constantly fresh with new challenges. Manufacturers, reps, distributors, BSCs, and in-house service providers would all benefit from increases in knowledge, training, and interaction. Ad we all know the information is out there already. Product information is available a few clicks; legislation information is available through organizations such as ISSA. Networking can be done on Linkedin, Google+, Twitter… and of course at the various annual meetings, conferences, and conventions. Training videos for products and procedures can be had on our manufacturer’s websites, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram… These are ALL great tools and resources. But, perhaps the true innovation will prevail if we can pull it all together in a collaborative, challenging, rewarding and centralized gamification platform? It’s something to think about…
