2022 Marketing Gamification Insights Report

The 618 preheated racing car has already arrived at the highway intersection, and it is just a matter of stepping on the accelerator.

In recent years, driven by e-commerce promotion activities such as "Stacking Cats" and "Invite People to Win Red Packets", marketing games have officially taken over the mantle of traditional promotional gameplay, becoming a major direction for platforms and brands to upgrade their marketing methods and attract the attention of young people.

In order to explore the nature of this phenomenon, the hidden opportunities behind it, and the plans and challenges of brands entering the market, we start from the perspective of consumer intention insights and how to use marketing games to safeguard 618, and talk about how brands should use games to retain young people in the current private domain revolution.

The mainstream user group of marketing games is young people. In order to understand these young consumers more comprehensively and completely and help brands explore appropriate ways to communicate with them, our team combined 3,000 questionnaires of young consumers, practical experience of more than 300 brands in marketing gamification, and more than 100 authoritative industry data to publish this "Where Have the Young People "Trapped" by the Epidemic Goed?" | 2022 Marketing Gamification Insights Report” (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”).

Based on the survey results and my experience in marketing games, I have made some observations and thoughts that I hope to share with more people.

1. The booming development of marketing gamification means the arrival of a new consumption era.

In today's consumer market, marketing gamification is on the rise, and various interactive marketing games are emerging one after another. Major platforms and brands are collectively "deviating from their main business" and starting to use marketing games to attract people.

We believe that there are three fundamental reasons for this phenomenon:

First, in the new consumption era, the mainstream consumer groups have changed, and young people have become the main consumers in the market. 364 million young people spend 7.72 trillion yuan annually. Games are the biggest interest and hobby of contemporary young people.

Secondly, China’s mobile casual game revenue reached 34.653 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17.42%. In an era of fragmented time, casual games that are easy to start and addictive are making more and more consumers unable to stop.

Finally, as public domain traffic reaches its peak and consumers' shopping habits shift to the private domain. Exploring private domains has become a collective consensus among brands, and casual games with the widest audience have gradually become a new carrier for private domain marketing.

Source Report

2. The core of marketing gamification is to use the natural entertainment and social attributes of games to connect brands and consumers.

While consumers are playing games, brands are quietly influencing their consumption decisions.

After the brand packages the marketing content into gamification, the appeal of the game itself drives consumers to spontaneously carry out a series of marketing behaviors. Among them, sharing tasks and UGC content generated by users themselves attract more new users to participate.

Marketing gamification growth engine

Consumers in the marketing game are highly sticky private traffic. In the day-to-day game process, they continue to deepen their understanding of the brand and then convert it into consumption behavior. All behaviors of consumers in the game will eventually be accumulated as data assets of the brand.

Comparison of consumer decision-making links

Faced with a marketing game that is gaining popularity, how do we judge whether it is good? What data do you need to see? What is the industry average for these data? For every brand practitioner who is new to the marketing game, these are often the issues they are most concerned about.

After obtaining the consent of the relevant customers, the team integrated some of the data with public industry data, hoping to help brands break through the data fog of the marketing game through a relatively objective industry data.

Average data indicators of marketing gamification industry

3. Only when the crowd portrait is vivid and profound enough can it provide direction for brand marketing decisions.

Before publishing the report, our team collected 3,000 questionnaires from young consumers to gain further insights into young people’s motivations and preferences for marketing games, hoping to provide more accurate decision-making advice for brand practitioners.

The report results show that young female white-collar workers in first- and second-tier cities who have high education, high spending power and high interactivity are the main high-value interactive group. At the same time, through questionnaires, the behavioral portrait of young people in the marketing game has become clearer.

In terms of game channels, 86% of young people use e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com as their main channels to access marketing games. E-commerce platforms and WeChat private domain scenarios still occupy their main attention and are also the main places for them to play marketing games.

In terms of gaming motivation, 78% of consumers said that "the game is fun" is the primary condition for them to participate in the game, followed by "getting discounts" and "support". Facts have proved that the fun of the game itself is often more important than the rewards, and "friends' support" is also "social currency."

Survey on consumers' willingness and preference to play marketing games

Therefore, games that are easy, fun, easy to get started, have rich gameplay, and are suitable for playing with friends are the first choice for young people.

In terms of game preferences, 88% of consumers said that cultivation games with simple operations, high playability and low time consumption are their favorite marketing game types, followed by elimination games in which female consumers dominate.

What types of marketing games do consumers prefer?

In terms of game duration, we can see from the report that 58% of young people spend 10-30 minutes a day playing marketing games, and 67% of consumers are willing to play for more than 10 days and never get tired of it. What's more, long-term games can keep them playing for more than half a year.

The natural fun of games can occupy more consumers' time, effectively improve user stickiness and usage time, and thus bring more commercial value to brand marketing.

After how many days do consumers typically leave a marketing game?

In terms of marketing tasks, more than 70% of consumers are willing to browse designated pages and collect stores/products in order to get more game opportunities/props.

What tasks are consumers more willing to complete in the marketing game?

It can be imagined that young consumers will not only not be disgusted by the additional advertising content during entertainment, but will also actively participate in the platform's marketing activities, producing a real fission effect and further helping brands to quickly achieve business growth.

4. The four stages of marketing gamification: consumer digitization, scene virtualization, interactive storytelling, and spatial interconnection.

Consumer digitization is the first stage application of marketing gamification. Through interactive marketing games, consumers’ behaviors such as joining, collecting, adding to cart, and placing orders are digitized. Gradually improve the identity identification of "who am I" to help brands draw a more accurate consumer portrait.

For example, during the 618 e-commerce festival, Adidas, Zhong Xue Gao, Durex, Midea, Xiaomi, and China Unicom all used "Synthetic Watermelon" to achieve magical synthesis. During the Double 11 Carnival, brands from various industries such as Nike, Adidas, Li Ning, Procter & Gamble, and Estee Lauder all chose "pachinko machines" to attract customers. During the Spring Festival, Chunzhen, Huawei, CASIO, OPPO, Midea, Clean-Bi, Quaker and other merchants all used "Menghu Love Elimination" to fire the first shot of Spring Festival marketing.

The two pictures on the left are "Pachinko" and the one on the right is "Moe Tiger Love Elimination"

Scene virtualization refers to combining product characteristics to tailor a virtual home exclusively for consumers to make them feel as if they are actually there. This stage mainly focuses on creating scenes for marketing gamification.

For example, the "AR Skiing" of the Keep APP allows users to travel to the ski resort in one second and experience the excitement and joy of skiing at the Winter Olympics without leaving home.

Interactive storytelling refers to vividly conveying the brand IP in the form of stories through interactive game content, making the interaction between the brand and consumers more heartwarming. Infuse soul into brand IP and capture the minds of consumers.

For example, when you adopt a cow, "Cloud Ranch" gives different breeds of calves different personality settings, and builds delivery rooms, canteens, dormitories, SPAs, dormitories and other scenes to vividly display the colorful "cow life" and let consumers fully experience the fun of raising cattle.

The left one is to adopt a cow, and the right one is to Keep

The long-term goal of spatial interconnection and gamification is to create a closely connected virtual settlement space. With consumers at the center, it brings together numerous brands and integrates diverse game content to create a personalized virtual space. Opening up interactions between consumers and even linkages between brands will make the virtual consumption space full of infinite possibilities.

In addition, our team is about to launch the "Mojing Space", which will give brands the ability to independently create a development-based membership space and gamify the membership level growth path.

Source Report

5. Brands should choose marketing game types that better match different business scenarios, member penetration and member mindsets to achieve maximum efficiency.

The high user stickiness and activity of the game have attracted many brands to follow suit and have also attracted more and more entrepreneurs to enter this field.

However, most latecomers in the field have failed to break free from the shackles of homogeneous competition, and simply crudely applied the success stories of the former to their own brands. This has greatly reduced the brand tone and game fun experience, and consumers' enthusiasm has also been exhausted.

We believe that gaming itself is a specialized field. Different from traditional marketing methods, gaming requires brands to have a certain awareness of gamification and advanced marketing cognition.

Suggestions for gamification scenarios in various industries

High-quality SaaS games are the first choice of many brands today. They have high requirements for the richness of types, diverse gameplay, and design plasticity of high-quality SaaS games, which is also a big challenge for game service providers.

How to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and empower brand marketing accurately, has become a sustainable research and development direction for marketing gamification.

Source Report

German educator Friedrich Froebel once said, "Games are the purest and most spiritual activities of childhood, and are also the outward expression of human beings as a whole." For our generation, games are a never-ending interaction that runs through our lives, from childhood to old age. Games are a form of entertainment, but also a way of thinking.

Nowadays, the boundary between life and entertainment is gradually blurring, but the connection between consumption and games is becoming stronger. From learning while playing when we were young, to buying while playing when we grow up, we are growing, and so is our brand marketing approach.

It is not difficult to please young people through games.

Author: Director

Source: Chairman