Gamification in Market Research

Gamification is an emerging technique in market research that allows us to passively conduct market research using games or create direct surveys, research platforms and other traditional market research techniques using gaming techniques. At the simplest level it is the use of games to collect market information such as brand awareness, recognition and research data. However, it’s also being expanded to include the use of gaming style techniques within online market research techniques; framing questions in terms of gaming styles, developing competitive techniques to encourage engaged responses and enriching respondent experience through gamification techniques. Here we’re going to examine these two types of gamification in market research and their role in current research practice.

Utilising Games in Market Research

Using games in market research is a very useful technique that encourages users to engage with our brand and provide market data in a way that can be viral, engaging and provide a wide variety of data. It can be incentivised and play on our competitive nature to engage the customer whilst actively or passively collecting consumer data. This technique effectively creates a ‘hands off’ platform that you can use to collect data. An example of this would be the recently released Facebook game Brand Bang where players revealed blocks from a puzzle hiding a brand logo. Points were awarded for guessing the brand and if a player reached 30,000 points a tree was planted as a reward. This exercise proved very successful at gauging brand recognition and increasing brand awareness.

In terms of creating games for marketing purposes the format may be somewhat limited in terms of the types of data that we can collect but there is clear potential to create viral research platforms where consumers continuously help us to gather qualitative data on products and services. There are clear potentials to increase the depth and breadth of game led research – though we are still at experimental stages.

Utilising Gamification Techniques in Market Research

While we can see the clear benefits of using games in market research gamification also is being extended to the way we construct surveys and research programs. The basic theory is that we make questions seem competitive, challenging or in some way game like. An example of this would be changing the question “What films do you like?” to “What films would you go and see on a date?” This gamification takes a standard question and puts it in a context. The argument for this type of questioning is that it contextualises a question and presents a scenario - thereby allowing us to collect qualitative and quantitative data that is more specific. At the same time it allows us to engage respondents by making a question interesting – avoiding the bland generic questions that put survey respondents off.

While there are advantages to this methodology there have been criticisms of using these gamification techniques extensively. The core problem cited is that we are essentially changing the question and therefore the data collected. The questions “what films do you like?” and “what films would you go and see on a date?” are essentially entirely different. At the same time gamified questions require further data to be interpreted as the answer may be dependent on a number of variables; what the persons partner likes, what that person likes, whether they see subsume their preferences under their dates etc. etc. Introducing these gamified questions may make things more interesting for respondents but it can lead to data collation difficulties.

Gamification can be used effectively in market research but we need to understand its limits and develop research programs that can encompass all facets of these questions, engage respondents and still providing us the insights we need.