Step-By-Step PLAN To GAMIFICATION In Digital Marketing (Interview With Arvindh Sundar)

Step-By-Step Plan to Gamification in Digital Marketing

1. Write down your customer’s Avatar as the Hero.
2. List your name as the guy or your product or your service.
3. Write down guide superpowers but leave it blank if you don’t know what makes you different from everybody else out there.
4. What are the monsters that they face? What are the problems that they face?

In this article, Arvindh Sundar shared his step-by-step plan to gamification in digital marketing. He also defined the idea behind Gamification in digital marketing and also included the two main psychological triggers that make gamification fun and addictive.

Who is Arvindh Sundar?

Arvindh Sundar is a good friend of mine that I met through Twitter. He is a Marketing Coach who specializes in gamification strategies for marketing. He’s from Bangalore, India. But he studied in the UK and got a chance to travel the world. He is a good father and a husband.

Arvindh has been working on his marketing framework since 2011 and he is one of the few people who has consistent money coming in from his online products.

When did Arvindh realize that Gamification was a big deal in Marketing?

According to Arvindh, it all started when he was still a child. His dad who was from India had the opportunity to travel a lot. He had been to China, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Singapore, and Malaysia. He often had to tag along with his dad which resulted in having books and video games as his best friends. And the love affair with video games continued even when he started working.

It was 2006 when he started his career in an IT company after finishing his engineering course. After five years, a reunion with his friends changed his life forever.

Before attending their reunion, he already considered himself successful. Why? Because of the following reasons:

1. He had a beautiful wife.
2. He had a motorcycle.
3. He had about 40,000 Rupees in the bank

Rupee is the currency in India which is approximately $500 or so.

But after meeting his friends and other people who had started working at the same time as he did, he felt like he was the ultimate loser in life compared to them.

And here’s why?

1. One of them was building a house.
2. Another one was going off to Venice on vacation.
3. A third one had a car

And as a result, he started to escape from the real world and went to a place where he still feel successful. A place where he didn’t feel any shame or haunted in any way and that was Video Games, particularly a game called Diablo 3.

He loved the game so badly that he ended up doing most of his time playing with it. Running around and killing monsters. He felt unstoppable. And due to the constant dopamine that the game was given to him, he completely lost himself.

It became so bad that:

1. He started ignoring personal hygiene.
2. Started ignoring work.
3. Started ignoring his wife

But one night, about past two or maybe three in the morning when he stopped playing to get a snack from the fridge, something happened.

He found himself sitting on his couch having dry coconut as a snack at 2:30 or 3 in the morning. He wasn’t looking at his screen for the first time and that’s where he asked himself, “What the hell I am doing?”

And the second question that popped into his mind was, “What if my life was like Diable 3?”

What if Arvindh’s life is an RPG, a role-playing game?

Back then, he didn’t have the necessary skills or knowledge to make it work but over time things worked out well. He began reading tons of books about:

1. Psychology
2. Game design
3. Gamification
4. Behavior
5. Motivation

And putting them all together, he arrived at a framework that is heavily influenced by The Hero’s Journey by Dr. Joseph Campbell. As well as the design elements from video games such as:

1. Points
2. Level Up
3. Loot
4. Monsters
5. Weapons

And together, he calls it The Game Plan. A framework that anybody can use to supercharge their marketing using elements of games in a non-game context which is essentially gamification.

This is one of the reasons why I and Arvindh got connected. When I first heard his story, I told myself that I need to talk to him. It was just fascinating.

What is Gamification in Marketing?

According to Arvindh, there has never been a more commonly accepted definition of gamification and the one that he worked with is using “game elements in non-game contexts.”

“So there are different parts of games, right? So you have art, you have story, you have mechanics, you have points, patches, leaderboards. These are all elements of games but when you take them out of a game and then you put them in a different context that is not a game, that’s what I mean by gamification.”

-Arvindh Sundar, Marketing Coach, Gamification for Marketing

Especially about the lessons that we can use from the game industry itself. Because the game industry is one of the places, apart from social media, where a ton of research has been done to figure out different things such as:

• How do you keep people hooked?
• How do you grab their attention?
• How can you point them in the right direction?

When you take all of these and a whole bunch of other things, and you plug them in together to either give you clarity, or control and to help you get liberated from the confusion is the usage of Gamification in Marketing.

In Gamification in Marketing, you need to consider the Put The Player First Framework, which is The Game Plan itself. Everything is an adventure, there are monsters and you are the hero.

If you’ve seen Lord Of The Rings, the little boy Frodo needs to throw the ring into Mordor, and that is his adventure. In that game, he’s going to be through a lot of monsters where he is the hero and has an end goal.

In Marketing, it’s like this:

END GOAL: To lose weight.

HERO: Me

MONSTERS:

• Mobile apps that let you order food in an instant.
• Snacks and chips within arm’s reach
• And an office on the second floor where nobody can see me snacking

So my adventure is to defeat all the monsters to reach my goal to lose weight, and it should be for the long run.

Who are the Best People and Businesses to Use a Gamified Approach to Marketing?

Arvindh believes that there are two categories of people or businesses that should use Gamification to Marketing:

1. People who are going from Zero to One
2. Somebody who’s going to go from One to N

People who are going from Zero to One

These are the people who are:

1. Trying to launch their own businesses, especially technical founders who don’t know how to market themselves;
2. Starting from scratch that don’t have experience or much experience

Somebody who’s going to go from One to N

These are the people who are:

1. Someone who wants to grow their business, especially solo founders from technical backgrounds that don’t have a feeling or sort of understanding of what marketing is;
2. People who want to start scaling their business.

Arvindh borrowed the definition from Peter Thiel’s Zero To One. A bonus point if you are a gamer.

What are The Key Psychological Principles Behind Gamification?

As mentioned by Arvindh earlier, there are tons of research that have been done in the gaming industry to figure out how can we design the most interesting and addictive experience ever. And some of the sources he mentioned are:

1. Actionable Gamification by Yukai Chao cited eight and perhaps nine core drives that anybody can use to motivate others to do stuff.
2. Drive by Daniel Pink
3. Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini

But from a Gaming Principle, there are two principles that can be easily borrowed and applied in any sort of situation particularly in marketing and business. Those are:

1. Motivation
2. Reframing

Principle #1: Motivation

Why do we want our customers to take action? How can I get them to do what I want them to do?

These are the number one questions in marketing today. Thru gamification you can tap it thru the sense of epic meaning. Some examples to be considered are:

1. Patagonia on Reddit
2. Our Place on Reddit

Patagonia

Nowadays, Patagonia has been running ads on Reddit (at least according to Arvindh as he received some) where they’re talking about saving some lake or water body.

Our Place

Where people could get to come in and drop pixels as a part of their marketing strategies that really boosts the whole activity on Reddit.

Why do these work? Because it allows them to be more creative. So motivation is a fantastic way to look at this.

Principle #2: Reframing

This is Arvindh’s personally really enjoy, the concept of reframe and bleed. He gave a hint on this before in his framework, Put The Player First, and it goes like this:

With this, you can now reframe this to your business itself except that YOU are NOT the HERO. In short, it can be like this:

So what are the examples of Weapons?

1. You can give them access to your community.
2. It can also be a product you offer.
3. Access to your courses.

Another real-life example of Weapons or the unique thing that you offer is my YouTube Case Study with Steven Hyatt where Steven shared how he grew his subscribers in 500+ in 60 days. This YouTube Case Study is what makes me unique.

Arvindh also pointed out that his framework can also be applied in:

1. Loosing weight
2. Teaching his daughter to read more

What is The Simplest Step-by-Step Plan to Gamify Our Marketing?

Here’s a complete Step-by-step plan to Gamify our marketing:

1. Write down your customer’s Avatar as the Hero.
2. List your name as the guy or your product or your service.
3. Write down guide superpowers but leave it blank if you don’t know what makes you different from everybody else out there.
4. What are the monsters that they face? What are the problems that they face?
5. List out the broken world. What are the pain that each of these monsters are going to be causing your hero.
6. Once you have the Broken World, invert it to get Paradise.
7. Break down the Paradise into Loot (stuff that they get as external rewards) and Level Up (internal changes that they’re going to get)
8. Go back to the of your Monsters, and in the Weapons Section, write what is one thing that you could create to help them solve each of their problems.
9. Then go to Quest, write what are the exact things that your Hero will need to do, step-by-step, to go from Broken World to Paradise.
10. Once you have written all these, start talking about it. For each of your answers, ask Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. And when you multiply them, you’ll get a bunch of prompts. Answer those questions and that’s how you should do it.

And as a companion to Arvindh’s framework, he created a free video course that talks about how his framework came to be and how anybody can apply it. Just click this Put The Player First to be directed to his free course.

The best way to connect with him would be on Twitter, @arvindhsundar

So what do you think of using Gamification in your marketing? Comment your thoughts and I would really love to read them!

And don’t forget to subscribe on my YouTube channel, @creategrowprofit.