EXAMINING THE CONSEQUENCES OF GAMIFICATION ON CONSUMER BRAND ENGAGEMENT

Abstract

Recently companies started to use gamification in their businesses by applying techniques and concepts from games to their marketing strategies. Gamification concept can be applied to actual games, virtual trophies, points, and vouchers. The idea is that marketing strategies and activities that mirror games are better at engaging customers. Accordingly, it was important to study the relationship between gamification in marketing and consumer brand engagement in Egypt. Through reviewing the literature, there were several gamification components and mechanics such as points, badges, vouchers, progress bar, levels, leaderboards, social engagement, collecting resources, and competition between players. Different gamification frameworks have described the gamification elements. Gamification pyramid was the most common by many researchers. For consumer brand engagement, it was measured using three dimensions named cognition, emotional and behavioral dimensions. A descriptive study was conducted to examine the relationship between gamification elements and consumer brand engagement. Capitalizing on Gatautis et al. (2016) model, which studied the relationship between gamification elements and consumer brand engagement, a new modified framework, was introduced. Gamification elements were divided to four mechanisms named progress, rewards, social, and restrictions mechanisms. The research studied the relationship between each mechanism as an independent variable and consumer brand engagement as a multi-dimension’ dependent variable. Quantitative data was collected by distributing an online survey on 152 respondents through online channels. Data was analyzed using SPSS software, providing the reliability, descriptive, correlation and regression analysis. The analysis of the results showed that there is positive relationship between three of the gamification mechanisms and consumer brand engagement. While for the restrictions’ mechanism; it showed in-significant relationship. This research gives insights to managers and companies that would like to apply gamification, targeting its end users to increase their engagement towards the brand.