Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests

I am totally on board with the authors' main concept, which is why it was so frustrating to try and read this book.From start to finish it is poorly written and edited, overly verbose when it could be much clearer and to the point, and nauseatingly vague on important details. For example, it dives into frequent flyer programs without clearly saying what they are, presents grandiose visions of how Facebook could be improved by a leaderboard, and seems to think Starbucks branches have a VIP lane. Plus it keeps using the awful term "Funware" to describe all this.Throughout, tantalising references are made to interesting concepts or events -- the Microsoft commercial, Flyertalk, Nike+ -- and either assume outright the reader is familiar with these, or provide little followup information for the reader to find out more. Even the section on Richard Bartle, the deity of player characterisation, was poor - lifted straight from Bartle's work with little original material about how this might apply to today's consumers.If you have any familiarity with games or reward mechanics, you will find this book as disappointing as I did. I wanted to like it, and I want books like this to spread the message that games and fun are a key part of customer engagement. But this book failed to deliver, and needs a serious edit before the 2nd edition. Read an article on gamification instead, and you will come away with all its key points without having wasted your time and money trying to read this.

I've bought this book from the self announced "Expert of Gamification" Gabe Zicherman to learn more about Gamification and how other companies applied gaming mechanics successfully. Boy, was I disappointed when I read the book (and I read it until the final pages patiently waiting for something positive). So why was I so disappointed you might ask?- 16% of the books pages are a collection of articles which are used as reference and the rest is an index of words used (nice way of filling up your book with space in case you don't have anything to say!)- a further 7% is filled up by Cover, Table of Content, Foreword and Acknowledgement - that makes it 23% of useless pages that I paid for!- the author is quite well in repeating the same over and over again. He's basically stretching his main messages which can be summarized in a normal 16 page pdf article over the full book- most interesting chapter is about the history of the frequent flyer program, that is for me, a person not born in the US ;-)- a full chapter is spent on Bartle's Player Types, interesting if you're new to the concept but 100% taken from Bartle, so you learn nothing knew if you heard that before- he's only referring to a couple of example and then points out mostly ones that failed - would be nice to hear also about positive examples of Gamification- nothing is being said about how to combine game mechanics to engage the customer for a longer period of time, no wonder Gamification is being seen as a buzz word and everybody thinks it's only badges and some frequent flyer program- the few examples he gives aren't going really deep, they aren't coming from working with these companies but rather from research what is available on the internet about it. If he did indeed work there, then he seems to be bound to only talk superficial bla bla about the work he did with themAll in all like I already said one of the few books where I'm really disappointed that I bought them. Especially so as I started to read the first few pages online here at Amazon, but I thought he it's going to get deeper and more interesting later on. I should have trusted my own feelings based on those pages that are available online. If you like them, buy the book, if they don't deliver a real interest for you to read further on, stay away from buying it, you won't regret it.

I am in the process of adding gamification to my websites and this book gave me a good understanding of the principles of gamification and how it works in the marketplace, especially where it applies to motivating learning and encouraging interaction. Well done, Mister Zichermann.

Although Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder have a very well written and polished book, I can't say that they have fully convinced me of there thesis. Game Based Marketing definitely has its place, but I would hate to think the Frequent Flier Miles programs are an ideal embodiment. The book talks about the low redemption rate of flier miles and how this is a huge plus for the program. Maybe I am naive, but, isn't one of the reasons for low redemption, very simple. People who travel as part of their job, might not be as inclined to travel on their days off? (Think about it.) If 80% of airline miles accumulation comes from the 20% who fly as part of their job, that explain the low redemption rate.I think that Gabe and Joselin lost focus on the most important thing, the customer. A customer, in any marketing program wants to feel valued and appreciated. More importantly the customer wants to feel like they are getting fair value for their time and money. Most of us DO NOT thrive on trying to accumulate points on a leader board. We DO thrive on trying to get something for nothing, or stretch our dollar as fast as possible.One of the fundamental reasons that a form of game based marketing, such as MacDonald's Monopoly promotion, has any success, is the notion that by participating, the player can have a life changing event. The player is led to believe that by collecting game pieces, the player can have a shot a $1 million dollars. It is the same reason a player puts in $1.00 into a progressive slot machine. It is for the thrill of getting a life changing moment. The author's clearly missed this.Games can be fun. Games can be a great way to promote a program. But DO NOT take your loyal customer base, such as a frequent flier program, and turn it into something where you stop rewarding them for good customer behavior. We live in cost cutting times. We are in a recession. If you want to inspire customer loyalty here is the tried and true method to achieve it:a) Listen to your customersb) Go amongst your customers. Send somebody high in the food chain to talk to themc) Appreciate your customers -- say thank you. Call them, and say thank you. At random, have the CEO write them a hand written thank you note!d) Offer them fair value for their moneye) Offer an outstanding product that your customers will evangelize to other customersf) Be better than average. Be better than good. Be exceptional in whatever you do.g) Reward your customers in ways that benefit them. If a customer makes a lot of purchases, reward this behavior by giving them discounts, special sales, access to premiums, extended store hours, etc. Do anything possible to make your customer desire to purchase more.Unfortunately, none of the items I listed above are a game. More importantly, I have a long list of companies who did not follow that list who are now either second tier in their industry, or out of business. The only game here is that one these so-called experts would like to play on a company's most valuable resource: Its loyal repeat customers.

This book fails to link games and marketing convincingly. It's little more than a homebrewed recipe for building frequent flyer programmes.I kept waiting for the good stuff on games. It never came.The basic idea in "Game Based Marketing" is this: We all engage in game- and competition-like behaviours in our everyday lives. If designed more like a game, previously unwitting players will spend more energy pursuing the goals you set up for them, than in their previous practical guise. There. No need to read the whole book. Because sadly, the 200-something pages fail to add anything new beyond this.Being both an academic researcher, consultant and game-designer, I would have thought to find something useful in a book with this title. There are many stories and observations, but thrown together in a rather haphazard manner, they fail to emerge in a coherent argument or toolbox (beyond repeating the word "leaderboard" and the occasional unrealistic fantasy about building massively multiplayer online games for large companies). At times, it almost reads like the authors' repetitive and unimaginative sales-pitch to a lot of different companies about how they should have done this or that in specific campaigns.The authors mix a lot of different ideas about costumer loyalty, sweepstakes, frequent-flyer programmes, employee competitions and even mentions digital stuff like Second Life and MMORPGs. They call it all games, but seem to have little serious background knowledge in the area. Their favourite tool appears to be a simple leaderboard. Nothing much on how such games work, or how people actually get motivated to play them. The few credible studies cited are dumped down and/or misinterpreted (hard to tell which) to a point where they are basically useless.Cutting through the fluff, every useful thought in here could be written in a short magazine-article. The book gets its second star because of the anecdotes collected on costumer loyalty programmes. The only other good news is, it's quick to read.

Application of game-based mechanics to marketing. Similar to the book Total Engagement. Some good, fresh examples and clear focus on loyalty rewards vs. frequent flyer programs. Short term vs long term desired customer behaviour.