From the large, sun-faded blue block letters to the chilly silence inside, Sears has sunken from a once iconic company to a ghost town. Hailed in its glory days as the nation’s largest retailer and biggest employer, Sears had completely changed the landscape of retail. So how did this business mammoth become the skeleton it is today, losing $573 million last quarter with shares down 15% this year? Sears atrophied from an inability or an unwillingness to evolve and was trampled by companies like Target, Amazon, and Walmart.
According to Belus Capital Advisors retail analyst Brian Sozzi, “Sears becomes more irrelevant by the day.”
So ask yourself: how is your gamification strategy? Has it succeeded in drawing users in and lifting long-term engagement as promised? Or has it tapered off, becoming more “irrelevant” by the day? To survive in a time of disengagement and waning attention spans, gamification needs the ability and vision to adapt. Any 10-year-old these days can code points, badges, and leaderboards to spike momentary engagement. The trick lies in sustainment.
Business Intelligence
The collection and analysis of user data has been a hot topic for quite some time. With gamification, business intelligence can give virtually instant feedback on users and their changing behavior, allowing online community managers to adapt and modify the interaction that their users have with the reward system. Striking the balance between skill and challenge level prevents users from becoming bored (when skill level exceeds challenges) or overwhelmed (when challenge level exceeds skills).
Design
Any information is useless, however, if it doesn’t point to a course of action. To properly take advantage of business intelligence, your gamification provider needs to understand the data, the user psychology represented by that data, and how to design game mechanisms that will complement that psychology to further business goals. Using quality business intelligence and design, companies can facilitate a feedback loop of action, modification, and reaction, to keep users after the point of novelty.
Gartner reports that by the end of this year, 80% of gamification strategies will fail, due to poor design.
Don’t let your gamification strategy be the 80% cobbled by boredom.
Don’t be Sears.
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