Does your marketing need to turn into a game? #sxsw

South By Southwest keynote by Seth Prieratsch



It was hard to take this guy serious at the beginning because he is one of those super smart 20 somethings who dropped out of college and came on stage wearing red sunglasses.

But after listening to him for 10 minutes I knew that what he was speaking about was the next "big" thing.

Seth first spoke about grades in school and his theory boiled down to making learning and grades a game. Why not gain experience points instead of grades in school? He feels that grades fail as rewards and schools should focus on the positive end goal and you shouldn't be able to loose in school.

Game layer thinking acts on individual motivation. What makes you check in on foursquare? How many of you out there are terrified about loosing your mayorship?

Gap tried to leverage the game layer by giving away 10,000 pairs of jeans by encouraging people to check-in via Facebook places. But the game failed. People didn't keep checking in after they received their free jeans.

Group buying services should consider leveling up: good, better, best. Change one time group buyers into regulars. Why not provide higher rewards each time someone visits. How many of your have used a Groupon and not gone back?

Groupon is an example of communal game play - "we need X number of more people to buy" so you share it and there is a countdown. Because of this, 95% of groupons tip before 8:00am. Groupon leverages customer acquisition & game mechanics - free lunch + communal gameplay + countdown.

Location-based-services(LBS)need to figure out "if i'm talking about a place or going to a place, is that location based?" LBS are not mainstream...yet, but they will be once they crack the game layer.

The black card by American Express is a great example of the game layer. Everyone wants the black card. People want status.. i.e you want to level up with Amex. "I want the black one"

So next time you are thinking of cracking a marketing problem, think about your problem and see how you can fix it with game mechanics.

@jaredroy