Case study: Gamification and Loyalty
A gamification project exploring personal data relationships and loyalty behaviours wants to involve and loyalty programme providers in its research.
The project is led by Mudlark, the digital production company who developed the Chromaroma game platform using the London Oyster Card. 
Mudlark are working with researchers at the University of Southampton and respected independent Loyalty/CRM consultant Chris Jacobs to examine how loyalty customers could engage with a similar model. The team are keen to understand how different demographics currently use loyalty schemes and how these groups might respond to gamification.
Mudlark’s Charles Hunter is leading the Innovate UK-funded project. He explains the background here.
It started with a meeting in the early days of Mudlark, when we were game for anything. We had already embarked on producing Romeo and Juliet on Twitter with the Royal Shakespeare Company (we called it Such Tweet Sorrow) and developing early locative games using heart monitors and PDAs. Our slogan was (still is) Making Life Playable.
Making Life Playable doesn’t mean just turning everything into fun or transforming experiences into set of rules and rewards. For us it means joining up three things: the amazing processing power of technology, the incredible creativity of the games industry and everything else that people do when they are not spending time on devices and screens (i.e. Life).
So we were sitting round at this meeting looking at Oyster Cards – the iconic travel smart-cards that keep Londoners moving round their public transport system. We learned that the chip built into the Oyster Card was under-utilised – could we think of some playful way of using that spare capacity?
The conversation about spare capacity lasted about ten seconds, because we realised almost immediately that there was a simpler, more exciting opportunity here. Your Oyster Card paints a history of your life as you travel with it. Every time you swipe it, you create journey data: your location, the time and the transport mode you are about to use or have just finished using. What if we could turn this data into a game?
Chromaroma was born, our first experiment in data-driven gaming. All you had to do to play was register your Oyster details at the Chromaroma website and go about your normal London life. If you checked in on the site after a few days, you would see scores and rewards, stylish and expressive visualisations of your journeys across the capital, together with missions and collections you had initiated or completed.
Although Chromaroma was very much a beta, the game quickly got a cult following of thousands. It received attention across the digital and intelligent transport worlds. What started out as a simple, albeit left-field, game became the heart of Mudlark’s thinking and ambitions.
We had always understood the entertainment value of a game driven by everyday life – an “ambient” or “pervasive” game. What we learnt in addition was that this is an extraordinarily effective method of linking people back up with the data that they themselves generate, in effect returning that data to them in a form they can understand, engage with and, indeed, play with.
Our work in the transportation field has consequently developed in exciting ways. We are talking to transport networks about developing similar games for their own travel smart cards. We are also making a card-free prototype travel game that will cover all travel modes, not just public transport, and take the game interface well beyond the classic gamification leaderboard’n’badges model. We are talking to transport authorities and integrators about using the game platform to encourage behaviour change, modal shift and sustainable travel choices. We are showing them how anonymised trackefd journey data can help understand cusoters’ travel behaviour – and how game incentives and missions can actually change that behaviour.
Gamification 2.0
The gamification movement started sometime after we conceived Chromaroma – we call what we are doing now “Gamification 2.0”. Another subsequent development has been the “Quantified Self” (QS) phenomenon – the multitude of applications that “self-log” users’ behaviour. Over 20% of US adults now use technology to track their own activities for exercise or fitness, with apps like RunKeeper, Pebble, Moves, Strava, MyFitnessPal, SleepCycle and Moodjam.
Chromaroma was in effect a gamification and a QS facility for the public transport user. We wanted to investigate how else we could develop this thinking and very quickly we alighted upon loyalty schemes. People use their various loyalty cards as easily and seamlessly as they use travelcards. Why not investigate turning a loyalty platform into a game platform?
Loyalty programmes classically aim to retain and grow loyalty using mechanics such as points, offers and discounts based on purchasing behaviour. The retailer loyalty programmes use the transaction data to minutely analyse the customer behaviour to better target customer communications, with data also analysed for business optimization. Although explicitly consensual (“we will collect and use information about you…Your information may be analysed” says one prominent scheme’s Privacy Policy), it is essentially a one-way data relationship.
We want to study the case for the transparent return of this data back to those who generated it, firstly by demonstrating how users would understand that data and find it useful. Our motives are: Idealistic – we really believe that shoppers should get their data back for their own benefit; Playful – we have several brilliant concepts for gaming shopping; and Commercial – we can show players in this sector a trick they are missing, and work with them to develop a new disruptive model. As for retailers, we want to explore how, by using gaming techniques, they can improve retention with the ‘stickiness’ of the customers’ engagement in the game, and devise challenges specifically aimed at increasing spend, frequency and cross-selling.
For sector expertise, Chris Jacobs is part of the team. His has worked in systems for over 40 years, the last 20 of which have been exclusively in consumer-focused marketing applications. He has been personally involved in the design and implementation of over 90 customer loyalty/CRM schemes and is familiar with most available customer loyalty and CRM solutions.
We’re also working with two preeminent academics in the personal data sphere. Dr Kieron O’Hara and Dr Max Van Kleek are senior research fellows on the SOCIAM Social Machines project at the University of Southampton. They specialise in the interface between society and technology, the use of big data and open data for citizen and consumer empowerment and technologies to enable data subjects to gain benefits from their own personal data.
We are keen to talk with as many players in this sector as possible, so if you are interested in getting involved, please email me at charles.hunter@wearemudlark.com