How do you engage an audience that is barraged with marketing messages and are not interested in hearing about your brand?

The answer used to be disruptive experiences which often led
to more annoying and shocking ads in more places (see above).

Thankfully marketers are moving away from disruption and
toward adding value as the means to engage a potential customer. Now the
question becomes:  What can you do to add
value and how do you successfully integrate this with your brand or product?

One answer is to add elements of play to your marketing, or more
appropriately, adding elements of marketing to a fun customer experience.

At a recent conference I attended I had the pleasure of
hearing Ken Eklund speak on “The Seriousness of Play”.  The talk underscored what I experience
firsthand in playing games with my kids: play is a great enabler of creative
thought, social interaction, memory and learning.  “Gaming is common ground, it allows marketers
to engage with customers and change their relationship with them.  Think about the Olympics impact on foreign
relations.” says Mr. Eklund.

To give you a sense of what I am talking about below are a
few examples of using games to engage an audience: 

Jeep’s “Way Beyond Trail” (Way
Beyond Trail is at the 2:00 mark) was a choose-your-own-adventure
video putting the audience in the driver’s seat (no pun intended).  This
program resulted in over 173K visitors spending more than two minutes on the
site. In fact, the average time spent was over nine minutes.

Volkswagen’s “The Fun Theory” shows how customers can be engaged using simple game mechanics that around a purpose. 

Think fun and function need to be at odds?  Eloqua designed a game like sales
presentation that won a B2B
category Forrester Groundswell Award and drove a 18-20
percent conversion rate from those who engaged in this application.

Many
companies are building the play right into the product.  Foursquare is the hottest new
mobile social network is not least because it is designed as a game. 

Unfortunately these examples are the exception, not the
rule.  So what is holding back marketers
from this area?

• No one is asking for gaming – stakeholders will
  not tell you this is a requirement, customers typically will not ask for it in
  usability, and it never shows up in customer use cases.  No one was asking for an ipod either.  The fact that gaming is still unexpected is
  an opportunity to surprise and delight your audience.
• Often the metrics do not fit neatly with
  existing marketing dashboard measurements. 
  This should not stop you.
• Like any entertainment product, many games
  fail.  Experiment when possible to
  mitigate risk and determine what will work. Do not put all your eggs in one
  basket, create a few inexpensive prototypes and test them with your audience to
  determine what works

If customer engagement and social relevance are the new holy
grails of marketing then designing for play should be put on the agenda of all
marketers.

So how do you do it? 
I turned to Ken Eklund a leading game designer and creator of A World Without
Oil to lend his expertise to the problem. Below are a few principles he
outlined for thinking about game design

• It is all about the gamer – know your audience
  and what matters to them
• Add thick value – create a game that does more
  than just entertain. Make the participants better people.  Provide education.  Create relationships between players. If all
  else fails give out prizes.
• Design for non-gamers – create an easy on ramp
  and make the subject matter relevant to a broad audience

Bottom line – make it fun and people will engage.

Russ Hopkinson

@rhops

Thanks to Ken Eklund
(@writerguygames) for the interview.