Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2012, when gamification was presented as a new trend; its examples, including Recyclebank, Simple Energy and Zombies, Run!, and its description of Sergio Jiménez and his company are from that time.
Among the proposals for increasing a company’s profitability is gamification. What is gamification? It consists of bringing the thinking and mechanics of games into business or social settings in order to change people’s behaviour (employees or customers).
In the words of Sergio Jiménez (Game Marketing), a leading expert and pioneer of this discipline in Spain, it basically means taking the features that games have, the ones that make us have fun, get excited and take part more, and using them to achieve marketing and business goals.
Gamification would be the intersection of marketing, psychology and technology, with the result that both a company’s customers and its own employees take part in processes, products or marketing campaigns with far better results and much greater involvement.
The benefit for the company is clear: according to Sergio Jiménez, by using these tools and techniques you can achieve any kind of goal that depends largely on people’s participation.
The goals can range from increasing users’ (customers’) participation in or use of the company’s website to raising the productivity and motivation of sales teams, with the end result of meeting sales targets and therefore making the company more profitable.
Some results that are already held up as global success stories for gamification are people becoming more aware of recycling and using energy more efficiently, thanks to projects such as Recyclebank and Simple Energy. Likewise, thanks to Zombies, Run!, a mobile app, many people have become motivated and determined to lead a healthier life.
With these techniques and tools, some websites have managed to increase their users’ participation by more than 650%.
Although this approach was born in 2010, it is already bearing its first fruit, and now it’s time to keep innovating.
In Spain there are already gamification companies, such as Sergio Jiménez’s own, puntoextra.com, which offers its services to human resources departments for team motivation, to marketing managers, to startups and so on.
There’s no doubt that a new model has been born among businesses that provide services to other companies. This young entrepreneur has already earned the nickname of gamification expert. The secret of his success? Passion, effort and perseverance, because he says that is the only way to bring value to the companies that backed him even before gamification became a trend.
Featured image: Mshuang2, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
