How instant gratification is the key to successful customer engagement

What is the biggest benefit of your application? Why should a customer download it? What is the main reason for not staying at the home screen level and going deeper into the solution? Each product is focused on its main value that may attract the user’s attention, encourage clients to visit the solution and check out all parts thereof. In gamification, the biggest value the user gets is appreciation - for how good they are, for the things they have already achieved within the...

5 January 2018 | Customer Experience

What is the true value of your mobile app real estate?

How many branded apps does your brand maintain? What is the “real estate” value of these apps? Unlike bricks and mortar, the key phrase in branded apps is not location, location, location, but is engagement, engagement, engagement, carefully, methodically linked to the brands your important customers experience (UX).

What is a branded app? It is simply an application normally placed on a mobile device that a brand or company uses to reflect and promote its brand identity....

30 May 2017 | Branding

Mobile gaming as a truly global marketing tool: Are you a gamer, or ‘brandventurer’?

Mobile gaming is the world's first truly global marketing tool.

With over 1.9 billion players worldwide according to Tapjoy, it is time for brands to start to adopt the video (mobile) game platform across their marketing platforms and use video games to provide solutions to their marketing needs.

Video or mobile gaming?

Perhaps part of the delay in using mobile gaming is the misunderstanding of the profile of current gamers, who are mistakenly thought to be people with limited...

29 March 2017 | Customer Experience

The top five gamification mistakes marketers make – and how to avoid them

Gaming has been around for decades, and anyone who has ever played a game of Candy Crush Saga will tell you, it’s undeniably addicting. I know I’m not alone on this – considering the deceptively simple game has generated more than 500 million installs during its first year in the app stores. As online gaming continues to soar in popularity, it makes sense that it’s caught the attention of advertisers and marketers who are eager to reach the growing gaming...

16 March 2017 | Customer Experience

Mobile marketing is dead: Long live gaming marketing

(c)iStock.com/Cylonphoto

Opinion A recent study conducted and released by MobileBridge indicates that mobile marketing tools, though accepted by the marketing community, have been slow to receive updates and delayed in expanding their current mobile apps. It seems that mobile technology is way ahead of marketing applications and perhaps ahead of the understanding of this potentially beneficial technology as well.

What does that mean to me, as a supporter of integrated marketing...

17 February 2017 | Branding

Why marketing is the true ‘game of games’: Could a video game be in your future plans?

(c)iStock.com/ilbusca

What connects the ever-increasing rash of zombie-based, end/beginning of civilisations series, history of now, robotic lifestyles, and topic-related movies? They all seem to pose the question: does media drive culture, or culture drive media?

I ask this question in part based on this story, as well as my recent readings, which include Pendulum, by Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew, Prosper, by Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart, and Tribes, by Seth...

9 February 2017 | Customer Experience

What can mobile coupons add to the customer experience?

(c)iStock/bowdenimages

It’s no secret, everyone loves a discount. Supermarkets and retailers have used coupons for decades to draw in new customers or simply to gain market share for a product.

And it’s big business: according to Valassis, consumers are benefitting from approximately £3.3bn worth of coupons or vouchers per year.

The second coupon revolution

Tesco’s Clubcard launch was one of the most important retail innovations of the...

28 November 2016 | Gamification

Why brands need to catch the hype train to reach digital audiences

(c)iStock/vadimguzhva

The internet has created a world full of hype. From the latest smartphone to remakes of Hollywood blockbusters, annual versions of the same videogames or the most recent fashion line; online audiences react quickly and get very excited about things long before they’ve launched.

To get the hype train rolling with such an engaged audience, it’s important for advertisers to make smart decisions and activate media when excitement and engagement is...

25 November 2016 | Gamification

Why gamification could be the answer to your marketing woes

(c)iStock.com/Sasa Komlen

It’s not often you leave your office in the City and see suited and booted business professionals immersed in their mobile phones, searching for an invisible object. Nor is it the case that teenagers have been excitable about leaving the house to go on a wild-goose chase, rather than watching the newest episode of Made in Chelsea.

Then came Pokémon Go.

Only a couple a months ago we saw the launch of this viral game and people headed...

30 September 2016 | Branding

Gaming: The next big thing in social media and digital marketing?

(c)iStock.com/Wachiwit 

In a world long ago, I designed or assisted in the design of a series of conflict simulation board games—mostly complex, very realistic war games, long before online games were common.

I was very observant, understanding the gamers’ demographics, their needs, habits, desires, the history of the game, and maintaining the needed, correct, realistic history of the event portrayed. 

In the back of my mind, I was always thinking...

22 July 2016 | Gamification