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By Brian Burke
Gartner, Inc.
What’s new about gamification? Organizations have borrowed elements such as points and badges from games and used them to motivate people for a long time. Weight Watchers, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and military organizations have been using this approach to motivate people for a half century, a century and millennia (respectively). Of course in those days, engagement was limited to the physical world. What’s new about gamification is that by means of a digital engagement model, motivation can be packaged into an app or device and scaled to engage an audience of any size at a very low incremental cost.
But not all companies are making the leap. As is often the case, some old guard companies will be blindsided by the transition to digitally delivered motivation. Others will stumble in their attempts to transition from what works in the physical space to the digital arena.
Weight Watchers provides a case in point. The popular weight loss program has historically relied on meetings to engage its more than 1 million members. But meetings are resource-intensive, requiring Weight Watchers to employ 56,000 people. In contrast, MyFitnessPal uses a digital engagement model to help people lose weight and exercise, and it supports 50 million users with approximately 75 employees. That’s the power of digital business. With a costly physical engagement model, Weight Watchers has struggled. Over the past two years, its meeting revenues have been declining along with its share price, and the CEO departed. Among other factors, the company blames its poor performance on “increased competition from Internet, free mobile and other weight management applications, activity monitors and other electronic weight management approaches.”
Gamifying Global Youth Events
On the other hand, Craig and Marc Kielburger, founders of Free the Children, took a massive physical gathering and used gamification to extend engagement over time. The brothers’ mission is to inspire youth to act for global change. They created We Day, a series of events designed to “empower and enable youth to be agents of change.” We Day events, held in nine cities in Canada and three in the United States, bring together tens of thousands of youth in a stadium for a day of education, engagement, and inspiring speeches and performance focused on critical local and global issues.
While these massive events have become powerful opportunities to engage and inspire youth, the Kielburgers wanted to extend their mission even further. As Craig Kielburger explained, “Now the challenge, of course, is that We Day is one day. Our dream is to take that spirit and feeling of connectivity and empowerment and education that we see at We Day, and make it something that is far more constant in your life, and far more empowering — because you can connect on a daily basis with that energy and live that same spirit 365 days a year.”
To answer this challenge, Free the Children partnered with Telus to introduce We365, an app that digitally engages and motivates youth throughout the year. We365 uses gamification to motivate youth to complete challenges, track and verify volunteer hours, and be part of a larger community of people who are taking action for social good. We365 is exemplary of what gamification is really about — it is a way of packaging motivation into a digital engagement model and inspiring people to act.
Motivation at Scale and Cost
While we should never underestimate the motivational power of a real-world pat on the back, there are many advantages of using digital over physical engagement — most notably scale and cost. Digital engagement models scale to virtually any number of participants at very low incremental cost, while physical engagement models have much higher incremental costs for each new participant. The result is that gamification provides the opportunity to package motivation into a digital engagement model and scale it at a much lower cost than a similar physical engagement model.
Nike builds gamification into products like the FuelBand to achieve the same thing — packaging motivation into a digital engagement model — even if the audience and the goal are different, the method is the same. As Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of digital sport, states, “The more people move, the better it is. So, we have products that can inspire and enable everyone to be more active.”
Gamification can be used to package motivation and engage many different audiences in many different activities. Organizations like DirecTV, NTT Data and the U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions are using gamification to motivate employees. Companies like Barclaycard, Vail Resorts and BBVA are using gamification to motivate customers. In all these cases, the common denominator is the same — packaging motivation into a digital engagement model.
There is no magic in gamification — it uses the same motivational techniques that have been around for centuries. Building self-esteem and re-enforcing it with peer recognition is a powerful means of unlocking motivation. Gamification leads players on an experience to help them to achieve their goals, and while that’s important, it’s not entirely new. The real news with gamification is the digitalization of motivation, and in the near term it will become a key part of every organization’s digital business strategy.
Brian Burke is a research vice president at Gartner, specializing in enterprise architecture and gamification. He is author of the book, “Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Extraordinary Things”. The book is available on http://www.gartner.com/gamify.
Gartner, Inc.
What’s new about gamification? Organizations have borrowed elements such as points and badges from games and used them to motivate people for a long time. Weight Watchers, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and military organizations have been using this approach to motivate people for a half century, a century and millennia (respectively). Of course in those days, engagement was limited to the physical world. What’s new about gamification is that by means of a digital engagement model, motivation can be packaged into an app or device and scaled to engage an audience of any size at a very low incremental cost.
But not all companies are making the leap. As is often the case, some old guard companies will be blindsided by the transition to digitally delivered motivation. Others will stumble in their attempts to transition from what works in the physical space to the digital arena.
Weight Watchers provides a case in point. The popular weight loss program has historically relied on meetings to engage its more than 1 million members. But meetings are resource-intensive, requiring Weight Watchers to employ 56,000 people. In contrast, MyFitnessPal uses a digital engagement model to help people lose weight and exercise, and it supports 50 million users with approximately 75 employees. That’s the power of digital business. With a costly physical engagement model, Weight Watchers has struggled. Over the past two years, its meeting revenues have been declining along with its share price, and the CEO departed. Among other factors, the company blames its poor performance on “increased competition from Internet, free mobile and other weight management applications, activity monitors and other electronic weight management approaches.”
Gamifying Global Youth Events
On the other hand, Craig and Marc Kielburger, founders of Free the Children, took a massive physical gathering and used gamification to extend engagement over time. The brothers’ mission is to inspire youth to act for global change. They created We Day, a series of events designed to “empower and enable youth to be agents of change.” We Day events, held in nine cities in Canada and three in the United States, bring together tens of thousands of youth in a stadium for a day of education, engagement, and inspiring speeches and performance focused on critical local and global issues.
While these massive events have become powerful opportunities to engage and inspire youth, the Kielburgers wanted to extend their mission even further. As Craig Kielburger explained, “Now the challenge, of course, is that We Day is one day. Our dream is to take that spirit and feeling of connectivity and empowerment and education that we see at We Day, and make it something that is far more constant in your life, and far more empowering — because you can connect on a daily basis with that energy and live that same spirit 365 days a year.”
To answer this challenge, Free the Children partnered with Telus to introduce We365, an app that digitally engages and motivates youth throughout the year. We365 uses gamification to motivate youth to complete challenges, track and verify volunteer hours, and be part of a larger community of people who are taking action for social good. We365 is exemplary of what gamification is really about — it is a way of packaging motivation into a digital engagement model and inspiring people to act.
Motivation at Scale and Cost
While we should never underestimate the motivational power of a real-world pat on the back, there are many advantages of using digital over physical engagement — most notably scale and cost. Digital engagement models scale to virtually any number of participants at very low incremental cost, while physical engagement models have much higher incremental costs for each new participant. The result is that gamification provides the opportunity to package motivation into a digital engagement model and scale it at a much lower cost than a similar physical engagement model.
Nike builds gamification into products like the FuelBand to achieve the same thing — packaging motivation into a digital engagement model — even if the audience and the goal are different, the method is the same. As Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of digital sport, states, “The more people move, the better it is. So, we have products that can inspire and enable everyone to be more active.”
Gamification can be used to package motivation and engage many different audiences in many different activities. Organizations like DirecTV, NTT Data and the U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions are using gamification to motivate employees. Companies like Barclaycard, Vail Resorts and BBVA are using gamification to motivate customers. In all these cases, the common denominator is the same — packaging motivation into a digital engagement model.
There is no magic in gamification — it uses the same motivational techniques that have been around for centuries. Building self-esteem and re-enforcing it with peer recognition is a powerful means of unlocking motivation. Gamification leads players on an experience to help them to achieve their goals, and while that’s important, it’s not entirely new. The real news with gamification is the digitalization of motivation, and in the near term it will become a key part of every organization’s digital business strategy.
Brian Burke is a research vice president at Gartner, specializing in enterprise architecture and gamification. He is author of the book, “Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Extraordinary Things”. The book is available on http://www.gartner.com/gamify.
