Who doesn’t love games? Traditionally conceived as a time-passing routine, modern day businesses are doing their best to change this.

Gamification as a concept is not necessarily a new one, the term has been floating around for quite some time now. But it was only until recently that it has grown in prominence, owing to the sudden surge in the need to create a unique, personalized and engaging experience for the customer. The basic premise of gamification is that it uses game mechanics for non-game applications; it employs the use of game elements to leverage a participant’s sense of challenge, competition, and reward to educate, change attitude or behavior and inspire action.

Businesses need creative marketing strategies to spread their company message and promote their brand. This is where gamification techniques come into the picture. Gamification in business is a popular strategy that has been proven to motivate and engage, often a mobile app. Gaming techniques – such as competition, ranking lists, scoring systems, and incentives – are used to attract customers with the goal of building brand loyalty, creating connections, and giving customers a reason to keep returning to the brand and purchase products and services.

What can gamification do for your customers?

With the gamification market expected to be worth $6 billion in 2019, we can expect to see a continuous increase in its use over the next year. The central objective of gamification as a marketing tool is to boost sales and increase profit. These customer-oriented games have benefits that propel companies closer to reaching their objectives, aid in collecting customer data, increasing engagement, boosting the company brand and promoting repeat business. Adding a certain motivational factor to a pre-existing experience in order to pull customers through the game-related techniques that create curiosity and drive engagement is what gamification is all about.

Mobile gaming is now big business with nearly one billion gamers across the globe expected to generate massive game revenues, the largest segment being smartphone and tablet gaming. Marketers and retailers are always on the lookout for new ways to gain an innovative edge in an increasingly competitive environment. Gamification – one of the most widely used and much-celebrated concepts in recent times – has already made a mark in the present day consumer-facing business. Increasingly, more industries have started to introduce this game-like feel across customer touchpoints to add a unique dimension to customer engagement, as a means to drive revenue.

When it comes to customer engagement, gamification has plenty of benefits: it’s an entertaining way to maintain customer interest in your product and organization, and by sharing their results and experiences on social media, your customers expand the reach of the game to new potential customers while encouraging brand awareness. Gamification can be used to garner consumer loyalty by being effective in ensuring consumer participation in programs. Therefore, brands can make participating a seamless part of the user experience. The more fun the users have, the more likely will they participate. The process of gamification can prove instrumental in introducing existing consumers to new versions of a product, to demonstrate features, or when customers are renewing their existing subscriptions.

What happens when you mix augmented reality with gamification?

Be it filling out registration forms, taking surveys, influencing word of mouth or creating referrals, gamification is very effective at driving specific forms of consumer behavior desired by marketers. The biggest impact of this technique lies in ensuring customers keep coming returning to the platform. In addition to points for purchase, providing users with a sense of achievement and competition while having fun and staying engaged for longer stretches of time provides real retention benefits. As consumer engagement and retention are keys to building long-term consumer loyalty, gamification allows marketers to increase their sales, acquire and retain customers. With the increase of new shopper technologies like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to create differentiated, personalized customer experiences, in the short-term we are likely to see a lot more gamification in marketing strategies.

GEON Network – a booming name in the world of marketing industry – provides the ideal platform for businesses to showcase a strong statement that they truly care about the experiences of their customers. In this highly competitive age, brands must go off-course and market their products in a more engaging way. Here’s something GEON Network is addressing by setting a clear-cut divergent path to your marketing outlook. The goal of GEON is to create a platform, as well as set a standard, for a new class of location-based, augmented reality applications that enable transfer of value and interact with the user at the same time.

GEON is a blockchain-based platform, with an Android and iOS App that allows anyone to create Geons – virtual spots that can be located anywhere in the world. A business creates one or more Geons to attract customers to their location and/or to build brand awareness. The Geons can have a brand or product logo which will be visible to target customers in the AR application. Each Geon becomes a loyalty beacon that is loaded with Geon Coins. The coins can be either converted to other currencies or redeemable for products or business-specific rewards (e.g. similar to the way traditional coupon or loyalty point is used today).

For example, a coffee shop may provide a discount to customers who redeem Geon Coins at checkout. The coins are then burned in this scenario and the shop owner needs to buy new coins to top up the Geon if they wish to attract more customers to their location. Retailers and mall owners can use the GEON Network as their primary location-marketing tool. This includes shopping locations, restaurant chains, and transportation hubs. With brands emerging left-and-right as competition, it’s no longer about just delivering a quality product or service. When customers are hooked onto your brand because they feel the brand experience is more exciting and unique, it converts over time into a huge marketing ROI.

Do you own a business or work in marketing? Are you trying to build brand awareness and attract potential customers? Then, get gamified with GEON!