Contributing to value creation through gamification as engagement marketing

Abstract

Digitalization empowered customers to serve as pseudo-marketers, actively and voluntarily, contributing further to the value creation process. Firms increasingly recognize that customers own valuable resources. To enhance value co-creation, firms are thus strategically adopting engagement marketing to deliberately motivate, empower and measure customers’ contributions. Engagement marketing facilitates information flows across firms and their customers’ network, thus enhancing value creation through the exchange of information. Gamification, a well-established information systems technique, enhances service offerings by harnessing the engaging power of game-thinking and concepts of game design. Gamification promises to be a successful opportunity for firms to create, deliver, and concurrently capture enhanced value back from users. We extend ongoing literature about gamification and conceptualize gamification as an engagement marketing strategy. We propose that gameful experiences facilitate emotional, cognitive, behavioural and/or social engagement, and ultimately support the users’ overall value. We examine gamification in relation to the characteristics of engagement marketing and its potential effect on customer engagement as the desired outcome of engagement marketing. We argue that the effect of gamification needs to be assessed on an engagement continuum considering various dimensions of customer engagement. This continuum ranges from positive (leading to value creation) to negative effects (leading to value destruction) and includes the prospect of a neutral effect. Measuring the effect of gamification on customer engagement (as a multidimensional construct) enables the firm to adopt strategies that capture value in a holistic manner.