GDMO on how to solve big business problems

The Government of Dubai Media Office (GDMO) today hosted the third workshop in its Media Innovation Lab series.

The workshop featured a presentation by Michael Wu, Chief Scientist of Lithium Technologies, on how ‘gamification’ techniques can be used to solve big business problems that involve long-term behaviour change.

Speaking to an audience of media and corporate communication professionals and students, Wu spoke about how the concept of gamification can be used by brands to co-create narratives with their customer in order to effectively engage and enlist them.

GDMO’s Media Innovation Lab is a unique series of events focused on sharing knowledge on media innovations that are having a far-reaching impact on the industry and beyond. Featuring events every quarter, the initiative has the aim of inculcating a culture of innovation and creativity within the media industry.

Wu prefaced his presentation by saying that the onset of social media has radically changed the process of commerce. The traditional two-step method of acquisition followed by monetisation is inefficient in the social media world.

Sustaining monetisation in the social space requires two additional ‘gears’ - engagement and monetisation. Engagement enables brands to capture the customer’s attention and loyalty over the longer term, while enlistment enables customers to participate in the business.

The four gears of acquisition, engagement, enlistment and monetisation need to work together consistently over the long term for brands to have scalable and sustainable businesses.

Speaking further about the importance of engagement and enlistment, Wu said that some of the most compelling brand stories are those that are co-created with customers.  Wu further spoke about how ‘gamification’ can be used to co-create brand stories with customers. He defined ‘gamification’ as the use of game attributes to drive game-like player behaviour in a non-game context with predictability.

Wu said that good games are designed to maximise ‘flow’, a concept expounded by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where people become totally immersed in what they are doing. People experiencing flow often forget about physical feelings and the passage of time, and their ego fades away. Good games progressively raise the level of difficulty and skill so that ‘flow’ can be maintained.

Wu spoke about various gamification tools ranging from points, badges, leaderboards, trophies, and ranks to different kinds of reputations. To drive customer co-creation of narratives using gamification, brands must first establish the effective timescale of the desired behaviour change. Driving loyalty that lasts for many years is for example very different from gamifying short-term behaviour changes. They will then need to build a ladder with a successively longer feedback timescale. To have successful outcomes, brands need to choose the most appropriate gamification tools that have the right successive feedback timescales built into them.

 

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