Gamification and the infotainment trap

Gamification is hot right now, and no wonder. It’s the perfect retort to people who warn of the death of surveys. Here, at last, we have a way to make surveys fun and engaging, to make it an experience people want to take part in. But the course of gamification doesn’t always run smooth.

MRS Conference heard this morning from Engage Research director Andy Barker and Heinz consumer insight manager Lisa Hunt who embarked on an experiment to try to gamify a focus group about soup.

Instead of the normal group discussion, participants took part in game-like exercises, some based on familiar party games. In one instance they were tasked with using only five words to describe soup, while in another they were challenged to make a sentence about soup by asking each member to say one word that followed on from the person before them.

Did it work? Yes and no. Hunt said engagement levels were “great” and that the responses they obtained were similar to those collected from the firm’s Facebook page. “That gives it credibility,” she said.

Barker, on the other hand, was less impressed. “It’s not naturally introspective,” he said, and he worried that the games “disrupted the dynamics of the group”.

“I think it started to get on people’s nerves because there was too much energy,” Barker said. Gamification “runs the risk of turning qual into infotainment”, he warned.