Games and Gamification in Market Research

Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success

Betty Adamou

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780749483364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

Games are the most engaging medium of all time: they harness storytelling and heuristics, drive emotion and push the evolution of technology in a way that no other platform has or can. It's no surprise, then, that games and gamification are revolutionizing the market research industry, offering opportunities to reinvigorate the notoriously sluggish engagement levels seen in traditional surveying methods. This not only improves data quality, but offers untapped insights unattainable through traditional methods. Games and Gamification in Market Research shows readers how to design ResearchGames and Gamified Surveys that will intrinsically engage participants and how best to use these methodologies to become, and stay, commercially competitive. In a world where brands and organizations are increasingly interested in the feelings and contexts that drive consumer choices, Games and Gamification in Market Research gives readers the skills to use the components in games to encourage play and observe consumer behaviours via simulations for predictive modelling. Written by Betty Adamou, the UK's leading research game designer and named as one of seven women shaping the future of market research, it explains the ways in which these methodologies will evolve with technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and how it will shape research careers. Alongside a companion website, this book provides a fully immersive and fascinating overview of game-based research.

PART ONE

World of Understanding – overview

Online market research as it is in the majority, is unsustainable. More than that, it’s not working to its full powerful potential. Yet.

Through issues like low participant engagement, depleting data quality and facing increasing competition through other forms of data collection, many research providers wonder how they will survive using the same traditional online research methodologies in the future. But change is afoot.

Using games and gamification in market research is not just a rescue mission, it’s a call to completely reinvent the way researchers work, how data are collected, the types of data that can be collected, and how participants interact with researchers and data collection systems. Game-based research methods (or GbRM – an umbrella term describing research that uses games and/or gamification) are about the survival of market research and making it thrive.

GbRM will help researchers improve participant engagement and nudge desired participant behaviours by turning the dial away from extrinsic motivators to intrinsic motivation and encouraging play, which, through the increased collaboration, creativity, engagement and problem-solving skills that come with intrinsic engagement and play, will help improve data quality, harness untapped insights, and even re-engage suppliers and buyers in the research process. GbRM could even shape the way we design data collection software or hardware in the future.

But this process of change must begin at the beginning: drastically improving participant engagement. And what better medium to be inspired by than the most engaging medium of all time: the game.

Gamifying a survey, or creating one as a fully-fledged game, is not a ‘lipstick on a pig’ approach: far from it. While games may seem frivolous to some, and by proxy game-based research may be viewed in the same light, this world introduces games through a lens you might not have considered before, showing how we can harness the capabilities and structures inherent within games to solve real issues faced by the market research industry. This world illustrates where those issues lie to pinpoint how and where game-based research methods can provide solutions.

At the most basic level, GbRM will intrinsically engage participants in a way never done before. This in itself has many benefits. You will be surprised how many people are simply grateful that somebody, anybody, is making an effort to develop more engaging surveys. Of all the frequently used terms participants provide in their feedback about Research Through Gaming ResearchGames, ‘thank you’ is the most frequent, followed by terms like ‘fun’, ‘cool’, ‘interesting’ and other similar sentiment. When I look through the feedback and see the comments… ‘that was great, thanks so much!’, ‘thanks for letting me be part of this!’, ‘I love this idea THANK YOU’, I think ‘no, thank YOU’. But these participants thank the invisible person behind the ResearchGame design, who they don’t know, because they’re so plain delighted it’s not yet another boring market research questionnaire.

But at the more powerful, advanced levels of using GbRM, it is at this point quantitative research transcends to become online qualitative. We can place participants in situations and simulations to understand how context drives behaviours and choices – all happening while we observe rather than ask questions. Through that observation, we will use game-based research to understand what people think and feel, yes, but also what they will do. In turn, this will help businesses develop predictive models to anticipate the behaviours and outcomes of a thousand marketing approaches, product developments, social service processes and so on.

At this level, we’re taking more advantage of the implicit and beginning to shape research experiences around the ways our memory actually works and how people live their lives. Through GbRM, we will use state-dependent recall but also future-gaze through designing state and context induced simulations to understand behaviours and choices. Research-as-game will finally be reflective of (and understand) the many complexities of human emotion and pinpoint key drivers to help businesses make decisions.

The good news is that all of this is already at our fingertips.

This world highlights how actually online surveys and games have many similarities, making GbRM more accessible than we might think. This section also shows us how much we can learn from the games industry to intrinsically engage our own participants and encourage their creativity, problem-solving and collaborative skills. We will do away with existing misconceptions about games and gamification to make room for understanding the benefits of these methodologies and what it is that makes games so engaging. We will look at the multiple facets inherent in games: a cocktail of narratology, positive reinforcement, heuristics, semiotics, linguistics, cognitive psychology and more.

And we will even look at how games, data and insight are already working harmoniously. This journey is just the beginning.

01

The impact of low participant engagement in market research

This chapter will cover:

• the eight side effects of low participant engagement;
• how these eight side effects negatively impact the market research industry at large;
• how the game, the most engaging medium of all time, is the perfect antidote to low engagement.

If we are to look at game-based research methods (GbRM) as tools for both prevention and cure of low participant engagement, then we must first understand the full picture of the issues taking place.

According to the 2017 GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) Report, 70 per cent of the market research industry relies on traditional surveys¹ to collect opinion data² and other forms of information. Other reports and market research experts predict that the use of traditional online surveys in market research is actually higher, at 80–90 per cent. Alarmingly, these high numbers do not negate (but perhaps even exacerbate) one universal problem: low participant engagement. Low participant engagement negatively impacts every aspect of the research process and every person involved. The drawbacks have been vocalized online^{3, 4} – highlighting the problems and spreading mistrust of market research. Consider these eight domino-effect issues.

Eight side effects of low participant engagement

1. Low response rates. Response rates describe the quantities of people who respond to a survey – that is, how many people actually begin a survey. Low response rates could be caused by several factors: there are other online distractions, or participants have so many emails that they miss your survey invitation. Participants who have been previously bored by online surveys may be reluctant to begin new ones, resulting in low response rates for all online studies, not just yours. This shows how one participant’s bad research experience can impact other projects, mak...