A small daily dose of gamification becomes a small injection of happiness for people, so nothing better than to adopt gamification strategies when we want to launch a message to consumers. In the previous publication about the gamification we already talked about the foundations of this phenomenon and the specific meaning of the term, and this time we investigate how to outline a gamification strategy uniting types of consumers with types of fun that can be offered.
Let’s start with a brief review of the types of fun that a game can deliver:
Hard fun: Playing to obtain a reward.
Easy fun: Focusing on the simple entertainment.
People fun: Playing to interact with others.
Serious fun: Playing to change something of the inside (therapy) or the outside.
And let’s follow with another one of the types of consumer:
The Socializing: They play for social interaction.
Free Spirits: They play as a way of expressing themselves.
Philanthropists: They play to enrich other’s lives altruistically.
Serious Players: They want to improve themselves.
Hard Players: They play for the reward.
Disruptives: They want to disrupt the system.
A correlation between the different types of fun and the diverse types of consumer will remain like that:
To address the hard players, it is recomendable to adopt a hard fun strategy, because they look for rewards and give its 100% to get their objectives.
Regarding to the socializing ones, the best way to approach them is adopting a people fun strategy, because they want to create a bond through the relationship with others, whether cooperating or competing, without the need of getting a reward.
Concerning the serious players and the philanthropists, a serious fun strategy that thrills and helps to introduce a change in the consumer’s life or makes a change in the world or other people without expecting a reward, is the suitable one.
The free spirits are motivated by a simple curiosity to discover, create and explore, so adopting an easy fun strategy is the proper option because it triggers the creativity and the imagination.
Lastly, the disruptores search for an alteration of the system (positive or negative), so they need an strategy that allows them that. Because of that, there is no necessarily a type of fun that can be assigned easily and directly.
But real gamification should contemplate a fusion of the 4 types of entertainment to appeal to all potential customers and to offer more than one option to stand out and be original. Ideally, the same type of ad or product should attract the general public, regardless of the personal motivation of each type of consumer. The stair case mentioned in the previous post is a clear example because it is a product that everyone would use for different reasons directly related to the types of fun: interact with others, health, just explore, and so on.
