Game Playing and Marketing Games Offer you a Unique Way to Entertain -- and sell at the same time! by Paul Ashby

Whilst experimenting with social networks, user-generated content and on line video, marketers appear content to view games as little more than another advertising platform. The untapped potential of game playing lies in their ability to tell stories, thereby more closely linking brand benefits with game play and blurring the lines between brand and entertainment. Games, properly structured, fundamentally alter the customers perception to the presentation and content of your marketing messages thus making the advertisements themselves a source of meaningful information.

Games allow Brands to become engaging, interactive and entertaining -- thereby providing something of value in exchange for attention. Brands such as Persil, Birds Eye and Quaker Oats have relied on game playing to create narratives that consumers want to be a part of. In the process, they've done more than just break through the clutter, or better position themselves in consumer's minds.

Games remain one of the biggest untapped opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging interactive and entertaining. Well-conceived games require users' active attention and enable them to drive the story line as they experience a world that can be entirely of a brand's making. Games represent a unique opportunity for brands to be the entertainment rather than just sponsor it.

So what do original games get you?

If you're Quaker Oats, you get year-over-year double-digit sales growth, as well as a marketing program that has generated significant revenue.

So what does this mean for marketers?

It demonstrates that there's a burgeoning mainstream audience increasingly receptive to branded entertainment in the form of original episodic games and willing to grant brands their attention in exchange for enjoyable experiences.

Games need to be implemented strategically. As with any marketing approach, objectives and performance expectations for game-based marketing need to be considered upfront. Here are some things to keep in mind: A game tends to work best as a component of an integrated campaign rather than an afterthought.

Original episodic games can counteract this imbalance by delivering a high level of play and replay value to consumers while putting the brand at the center of the experience.

So does a brand need to be interesting or provocative in order to make a good game? Absolutely not. All our examples show that basic games deployed and used well were effective at making a low-involvement category more interesting and engaging. And implemented properly, games could address many of the challenges facing financial-services companies -- building involvement, generating a prospect database, creating a sense of community, even delivering a positive brand halo.

Innovation requires risk. Being among the first to jump into a new medium is never an easy proposition for a marketer, but games offer a new and distinctive opportunity for brands to tell their stories to consumers -- and, in the process, to make themselves interactive and entertaining.

We must always remember that Television is an advertising medium, not a communications medium and, as television declines in the face of competition from the new media, conventional advertising will decline with it. Game playing is a substantially more effective way of marketing than one-way TV advertising.

People develop strong bonds when empathetic connections exist between parties involved in a relationship.

The term customer loyalty has become a mantra, but we've never read any words about the criticality of empathetic linkage in fostering customer loyalty.

That's because most marketing is still based on objective models which play down the importance of behavior. Objective marketing is more conducive to mental manipulation of consumers than to establishing empathic linkages.

Many Marketing Directors have told us all, time and time again, in so many words, "At the end of the day, marketing is a numbers game. To increase sales, you increase exposure to get an increase in the number of consumers in your traffic flow."

But protagonists of the various relationships marketing philosophies say things have changed.

Customers are defining marketing. That moves the discipline from its objective, numbers-defined foundations to a subjective feelings-defined foundation that some people are already calling "the experience economy," and others call "The Dream Society." Marketers have been trying to meet the challenges of the experience economy mainly with technology.

Personalization software such as offered by Net Perceptions and BroadVision and multitudinous products sold as customer relationship management (CRM) tools are all about: deployment of massive data base systems to capture as much details about consumers as possible to gain maximum advantage over their minds.

That is the prime intent of objective marketing models: conquest and control. Otherwise, what accounts for all the military metaphors used in marketing?

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships. This can be successfully achieved through game playing.

Up until a few years ago advertising was the province of a privileged few to the passive many. Now the ownership of moving images has passed into the hands of practically everybody and the articulation of moving images has passed into the hands of everybody with access to a phone, laptop or digital camera. We can now have our say."

In essence, the behavior of the audience is moving from passive to active participation so that TV watching or listening to radio in the future will be a very different and less sedentary experience than it has been in the past 80 years. Ultimate power isn't with brand owners or even with broadcasters, and most certainly doesn't exist with the Advertising Agencies at all! It's with the viewer. And it's the on/off switch!

Game playing fundamentally alters your relationship with your customers and effectively cuts through all the problems experienced by marketing programs at the same time allowing customers to have their say.