Gamification Marketing: Definition + 12 Campaign Examples

Gamification marketing is a modern marketing strategy where you entertain users with game-like elements in your marketing material. The goal is to engage your users with fun addictive content and create a good experience for them. Gamification marketing is extremely effective when done right. 

Keep reading to learn what is gamification in marketing. 

What is Gamification Marketing?

Gamification marketing is a marketing strategy that involves including game-like elements in your marketing material to engage them. These elements could include points, levels, and challenges. The goal is to make your marketing fun and interactive. 

The idea behind gamification is to make your marketing content addictive. You achieve that by tapping into aspects of behavioral psychology. Specifically, you take advantage of the human love for competition and reward. 

You improve customer engagement for your brand by introducing these elements of playfulness and interactivity. Gamification in marketing also motivates users to perform desirable actions like visiting your website or making purchases. 

Another benefit is that you can collect user data to better understand customer behavior. 

The best way to achieve all these benefits is to provide clear value for your customers. For example, you could offer a virtual badge for playing a game on your website. With this approach, you’ll build deeper brand loyalty long term. 

Benefits of Gamification Marketing

Gamified marketing is an extremely effective way of boosting your campaigns. By gamifying marketing you’ll provide more memorable and stimulating customer interactions. The result is increased user engagement. 

Improved customer engagement results in customers being motivated to spend more time with your brand. 

Another benefit of gamification for marketing is increased customer loyalty. When you reward your customers through gamification, you create a positive association with your brand. 

This positive association is vital to motivate customers to stay loyal to your brand. 

Lastly, you can use gamification marketing to better understand customer behavior. Tracking your customer’s interactions with your gamified content reveals their preferences. You can use this data to tailor your marketing to more effectively reach new customers. 

These benefits are put together to improve your key marketing metrics like website traffic, conversions, and customer retention. 

12 Successful Gamification Marketing Campaigns

These are the 12 best marketing gamification examples to inspire your campaign. 

1. Nike+ Run Club

The Nike+ Run Club uses gamification by letting users set goals, track progress, and complete challenges. Users also receive achievement badges and coaching plans, and they can view leaderboards for competitions. 

This approach works since it directly appeals to runners interested in self-improvement. The gamified elements include external rewards, badges, and leaderboard positions. These rewards provide motivation to users to continue engaging with the app. 

The app further reinforces Nike’s brand by seamlessly creating a direct connection between runners’ goals and Nike. The app’s social features also build a sense of community and loyalty. 

Nike improved their customer engagement and brand image by integrating these features into their fitness app. They also used the data they collected via the app to inform marketing and product strategy decisions.

Starbucks Rewards

The Starbucks Rewards programs achieve gamification with a tiered system of benefits. Users receive better rewards with increased spending. Customers all receive stars for their purchases and have the choice to complete challenges. 

These elements create a sense of progress and urgency for Starbucks customers. 

The Reward program’s simplicity also makes participation easy, which explains its widespread success. 

Starbucks’s Rewards program increased consumer spending, especially for mobile ordering. Starbucks also collected massive amounts of customer data they’ve used for personalized marketing.

This rewards program also significantly improved the positive association between customers and their brand.

M&M’s Eye-Spy Pretzel

M&M’s chose to gamify marketing with their Eye-Spy Pretzel campaign. The campaign involved an ‘I Spy’ game where users searched an image to find the hidden pretzel. It was a fun and simple game that easily entertained users. 

The game proved to be addictive and tapped users described it as nostalgic. The game also promoted the product because it visually distinguished M&M’s new product. 

M&M made the game further enticing by providing points that can be exchanged for rewards. This further motivated users to play the game. 

This was one of the best gamification campaigns because of its simplicity and high engagement rates.

Duolingo

Duolingo incorporates gamification into their app’s service. They provide a game-like experience for users through rewards for completing lessons. This approach lets them simplify the language learning process for users. 

For example, they have a ‘streak’ system that involves users performing daily activities to maintain their streak. This way, they encourage users to consistently practice learning a new language. 

Users also receive virtual currency and unlock new levels as rewards for progressing. 

This gamification approach works because they’ve integrated effective marketing within their app’s service. The streak system encourages users to interact with the brand and the rewards system motivates users. 

McDonald’s Monopoly

McDonald’s Monopoly was a marketing campaign that combined the classic Monopoly game with the McDonald’s brand. 

The promotion also served as a lottery. Customers would collect game pieces that’d be attached to menu items. Each game piece would provide potential prizes ranging from free food to a vacation. 

McDonald’s introduced a tiered rewards system to take advantage of customers’ thrill of a lottery. This promotion transformed buying a McDonald’s meal into a potentially life-changing event if users win a rare prize. 

This type of gamification marketing encourages users to continually purchase from you to potentially win rewards. 

The Captain Morgan Pose Off

The Captain Morgan Pose Off shows how you can use user-generated content in marketing. That makes Captain Morgan one of the best examples of gamification in marketing. 

The campaign involved users sharing pictures of themselves in the ‘Captain’s pose’. The goal was to build a sense of community around the Captain Morgan brand. 

This promotion’s best feature was its low barrier to entry, allowing widespread participation. 

Every submission in this campaign was effectively a free advertisement for the brand. The campaign was also successful because its social sharing nature improved its reach. 

Foursquare/Swarm Mayorships

Foursquare’s gamified marketing approach involves giving users rewards for visiting real-world locations. Users would compete for the title of Mayor for visiting a location the most. 

This gamified marketing approach gave users a sense of ownership by giving them the title of mayor. 

This campaign also benefited local businesses due to repeat visits from Foursquare users. So the promotion improved brand visibility too. 

This example demonstrates the importance of providing a sense of ownership for consumers. 

Chore Wars

Chore Wars built a role-playing game (RPG) to motivate people, especially young children to perform chores. The game achieves this by employing the elements of an RPG, including assigning experience points for completing chores and providing a leveling-up system. 

They designed their game to provide satisfaction for completing productive tasks. They also provided a sense of achievement for users and successfully gamified completing chores. 

This way, Chore Wars increased their brand awareness and loyalty. They associated their brand and product with productivity and accomplishment for consumers. 

Recyclebank

Recyclebank is another one of the best gamification examples in marketing. Their rewards programs incentivize consumers to recycle and make eco-conscious decisions. 

The brand provides points based on different activities, like weighing recycling bins or scanning RFID tags at recyclables. Users can redeem points to receive rewards from partnered businesses, like discounts at restaurants or grocery stores. 

Recyclebank’s goal was to reinforce their brand image by associating with environmentalism. They successfully achieved this by gamifying their service with a simple rewards system that widely appealed to consumers. 

The result is they’ve become a leading recycling brand. 

Codecademy

Codecademy achieved gamification content marketing by incorporating game elements in their service delivery. Their platform provides points, badges, and includes a leveling-up system to entice users to spend more time on their site. 

The Codecademy website is also visually designed to reinforce the brand’s reputation as a fun learning tool. Their website includes visual progress tracking and regular celebrations of learning milestones. 

Through this approach, Codecademy achieved providing their users with a pleasant online learning experience. Their gamified approach also successfully reinforces their brand image as the best online learning site for programming. 

Domino’s Pizza Hero

Domino’s Pizza Hero is also one of the best gamification marketing examples. Pizza Hero is a game-like platform where users build their dream pizzas. Users have the chance for their pizza design to be featured on the official Domino’s menu. 

The platform engaged users and encouraged social sharing. Dominos also offered an additional incentive via royalties if a user-submitted pizza is accepted in their menu. 

The Pizza Hero promotion was successful because of its simplicity and strong social and potential financial incentives. 

Dominos successfully improved their brand image and fostered greater customer loyalty by offering this game. 

Samsung Nation

Samsung Nation is also one of the best gamification in marketing examples. This promotion involved members taking part in challenges, like product quizzes. Users would receive points and badges for completing challenges. 

The promotion featured a tiered reward system with users receiving increasingly better rewards over time. These rewards included exclusive discounts and invites to special events. 

Samsung Nation worked by playing on people’s desire for recognition and community. Samsung successfully built a shared emotional connection among their customers through Samsung Nation. 

This campaign’s successes are due to its social nature and effective rewards system. Samsung also collected valuable user data that revealed customer preferences. They then used this data to improve future product choices. 

Drive More Engagement With Gamification Marketing

What is gamification in business? It’s when you introduce game-like elements, like points and a rewards system into your marketing content. Gamification engages your customers, offers a chance to collect data, and improve your brand image. 

Gamification is one of the most important strategies in modern marketing. The 12 examples we’ve included should inspire you to implement gamification tactics for your next marketing campaign. 

Studying your customer behavior using Mandala AI tools is highly advisable to identify the appropriate marketing strategy of your brand. Sign up today for the free trial.