Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests [Hardcover]

Gamification is revolutionizing the web and mobile apps.

Innovative startups like Foursquare and Swoopo, growth companies like Gilt and Groupon and established brands like United Airlines and Nike all agree: the most powerful way to create and engage a vibrant community is with game mechanics. By leveraging points, levels, badges, challenges, rewards and leaderboards – these innovators are dramatically lowering their customer acquisition costs, increasing engagement and building sustainable, viral communities.

Game-Based Marketing unlocks the design secrets of mega-successful games like Zynga’s Farmville, World of Warcraft, Bejeweled and Project Runway to give you the power to create winning game-like experiences on your site/apps. Avoid obvious pitfalls and learn from the masters with key insights, such as:

• Why good leaderboards shouldn’t feature the Top 10 players.
• Most games are played as an excuse to socialize, not to achieve.
• Status is worth 10x more than cash to most consumers.
• Badges are not enough: but they are important.
• You don’t need to offer real-world prizing to run a blockbuster sweepstakes.

And learn even more:

• How to architect a point system that works
• Designing the funware loop: the basics of points, badges, levels, leaderboards and challenges
• Maximizing the value and impact of badges
• Future-proofing your design
• Challenging users without distraction

Based on the groundbreaking work of game expert and successful entrepreneur Gabe Zichermann, Game-Based Marketing brings together the game mechanics expertise of a decade’s worth of research. Driven equally by big companies, startups, 40-year-old men and tween girls, the world is becoming increasingly more fun.

Are you ready to play?

Written by videogame innovator and entrepreneur Gabe Zichermann and writer Joselin Linder, Game-Based Marketing explores "Funware," a new model for incorporating and leveraging games and game mechanics to reach today's customers. Behaviorally based, Funware will give you strategic insight into the deep-seated impulses and habits that drive our socially networked marketplace.

In this groundbreaking guide, you'll discover which game-based marketing programs have already generated millions in revenue and produced the world's most loyal and engaged customers. You'll get a firsthand look at how this powerful approach applies to the new world of social media. Most importantly, you'll see how to create game-based marketing plans that measurably increase both sales and profits.

Game-Based Marketing gives you practical guidance on adding games and gaming concepts to your marketing toolbox, including:

• How to cut through the media noise to use games more effectively

• Why "free to play" designs are irresistible to customers and lead to long-term revenue

• How to leverage the passive games people are playing every day without even realizing it

• How to create virtual economies and link them to your real-world business objectives

• Who the different types of gamers are, and how to reach them—even when they're not "intentionally playing"

• How to use games internally to motivate employees and boost sales

• How to find the best game-based techniques for communicating with youth markets

• And much more

Filled with case studies from leading brands such as NBC, United Airlines, the U.S. Army, and more, Game-Based Marketing examines how Funware delivers results today and will be an integral marketing channel tomorrow. Use the tools in this book to reinvent your marketing strategy, or you might be out of the game altogether.