In-app gamification for promoting visits to the Grand Century Place

 

(11 Oct, 2013) Trick-or-treat! For retailers, Halloween is getting to be a potential big treat for them to spur their sales. To attract shoppers to the Grand Century Place (GCP), the Gravitas Group has adopted the in-app gamification strategy to integrate a campaign-based mini game into its mobile app, the owned platform previously developed by Gravitas, to promote engagement, mall visits and consumptions.

The design of the game is fun and simple, yet challenging. Audiences have to spot out the numbers of hidden objects, such as ghosts and black cats, at obscured scenes as soon as possible. As time passes, the clarity of scenes sharpens with decreasing scores. To keep it interesting and encourage repeated participation, each time the numbers of objects under the same scenes are different. This maintains a sense of excitement and achievement to returned users.

Its location-based feature drives users from online to the offline platforms. Users will receive double scores playing the in-app game at the GCP. Upon reaching certain scores, they will be rewarded with prizes that can only be redeemed in person at the mall.

Players are rewarded with special postcards and cash coupons to encourage shopping. Designed by the renowned artists Brandt Peters and Kathie Olivas, the limited edition of Wandering Misfits postcards are available for this campaign only. The uniqueness of this prize combined with the superb artistry delivers priceless values to audiences. The postcards also serve to synchronize the theme of the GCP’s Halloween campaign ‘Hide & Seek in the Halloween City’, which features the Wandering Misfits characters everywhere.

To achieve constant traffic to the GCP, prizes are in limited quantity distributed on first-come-first-served basis each day. Psychological time pressure to go to the mall and redeem the prizes is thus posed. Distributing prizes daily sustains the app engagement and mall revisits throughout the promotion period.

Retention of app users is always a big challenge to marketers. According to a recent research by the Flurry Analytics, less then one-third of apps still survived on users’ Smartphones two months since downloaded. To persist the connection with audiences beyond time and locations, delighting them through gamification on the GCP’s owned mobile app is for certain one compelling and cost effective way to drive app engagement, mall revisits and consumptions.