Marketing trends are constantly changing, and ten years ago, no one would have ever guessed how influential social media could have been in online marketing, yet it has become arguably the most dominant force in the marketing world today. Another trend that as taken off over the last few years is called ‘Gamification’.
Gamification is a social grand that first started just over a decade ago, and involved providing incentives in various aspects of software, human interaction and popular activities in order to increase participation and create hype. As a marketing tool, gamification is incredibly powerful, and a few social networks have successfully built their platforms around gamification. Reddit, for example, allows users to reward each other with ‘upvotes’ for posts that are interesting. This serves as an indicator of the most popular posts and posters, and also discourages posting just for the sake of it.
Many companies have integrated technology and the use of objects and our environment in order to create a game. In 2014, Google had an initiative on April Fools Day that allowed users to ‘catch’ Pokemon by browsing the Google Maps Street View. The popular alternative music festival hosted in South Africa, Oppikoppi, released an app that would reveal the names of the artists that were booked to perform at the festival, depending on where the user was located. If you were located close to Table Mountain, viewing the app would show you the artist’s name hovering above the mountain itself. This allowed the festival to generate incredible amounts of hype, and started a two week long easter egg hunt, with users and potential festival goers working together and searching the streets to find out who would be performing at the festival.
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