Lessons for Advertisers from Gaming

Humans love games. Games give us valuable clues about how customers think, act, solve problems, process data and assess value. 

Games are a fingerprint and a barometer of our culture. Marketers will increasingly need to draw upon the principles of gaming in order to understand, enable and communicate with a population that has integrated gaming conventions into their consciousness and consuming behavior. 

Games are a vital component of learning in our culture.  From the military, to UPS to big business, games are used extensively for training, orientation and skill improvement. Almost everyone plays some form of online games. Gaming is the number one online activity regardless of demographic. 

Gaming culture has a keen influence on customer segments and our popular aesthetic. Consider these how gaming conventions suggest insights into consumer wants and needs. 

Persona Selection. Many games require players to create or select a persona or build an avatar. These doppelgangers project hopes, dreams and self-images of the people who choose them. Some reflect their current state of mind or self-assessment, others project fantasies and still others are random idiosyncratic choices. All give us clues about how to engage them. 

Level Setting. Players decide which level to start the game; in effect which level of skill or competence they feel. They are telling us where they are at and how they want to be engaged. 

Constant Choice. Consumers expect the freedom to pause, restart, and find alternative paths to the same goal. Self-directed activity is the norm everywhere except for traditional advertising where we still try to force-feed messages to audiences by interrupting consumers while they are doing something they like. Giving consumers choices increases rather than decreases attention to and engagement with commercial messages. 

Rewards. Players are motivated by rewards and rankings. At each stage, games reward performance, congratulate players and incent them to keep playing. Small incentives recognize individual achievements. Leader boards publicly display successful outcomes and set expectations for what it takes to win. Public recognition motivates a healthy segment of the market and establishes widely accepted norms. 

The challenge for advertisers and marketers is to find a way, without masquerading, to play along. Gamers need the flexibility to attack the problem their way. This has profound UI-UX implications and it validates the need to create a smorgasbord of commercial content that consumers can access according to their personal preferences and timetables.

Comments

[Andy Harrison]

Great post.

But aren't there variations depending on the nature of the game (e.g., Knowledge-based vs. reflexes).

Further, what is your take on the time commitment required to play a game and, more importantly to advertisers, to read and respond to an ad in the digital environment.