Surveying The Crowd!

Using gamification as a marketing technique is a recent tool that has come into use. It only surfaced a couple of years ago and has had quite a boom, due to a lot of people feeling the need to be able to be more in contact with what they are working / buying and selling with. The increase in people using gaming and enjoying games that offer rewards, started the idea of offering rewards for buying certain things. Like loyalty cards, members discount etc. It has been proved that people are more lenient in buying something if they can get something back in return.

This lead to us wanting to research into whether this technique actually works, so we used a simple marketing research technique to try to prove that gamification can have an effect on people when asking them to do something as simple as completing a survey. On October 25th we stood at the top of Wind Street and had 40 of the same surveys twenty for the first hour and twenty for the second. For the first hour we tried to get people to complete them, with little luck, we only managed to obtain seven surveys. Then as we went into the second hour, we pulled out a box of twenty chocolate bars and offered them to people in return for completing the surveys. A simple concept but gamification all the same a reward was offered to obtain, if it was a survey for actual marketing research, results. In this second hour we managed to get the full twenty surveys completed and with a lot of enthusiasm from the people that participated as opposed to the people who participated in the first hour who always seemed to be in a rush and with little actual willingness to help us out.

This research proves that by offering rewards to people, even the simplest of ones, results can be achieved. So how can gamification not be a positive and benefit people who are buying or selling.