By: Brian Lamar, Mike Cook
Bjorn Simmons, Wyzerr co-founder
Bjorn Simmons, co-founder of Wyzerr, a tech startup that migrated from Silicon Valley to Northern Kentucky within the last year, facilitated a lively discussion regarding playification and gamification of surveys at the recent Marketing Research SIG meeting.
In marketing research, consumers (and marketers) have gotten to the point where lengthier surveys often lead to less engagement, with dramatically decreasing response rates over time. Additionally, minimal innovation in the survey experience across mobile devices just hasn’t helped those engagement numbers. This isn’t just the case for millennials, but all generations.
Gamification and playification, as Simmons shared, can take traditional surveys and make them more fun, engaging, simple, intuitive, and faster to complete. Technology similar to playing a game and using technology, from smart phones and other devices, can track and provide meaningful analytics in regards to consumer behaviors. Apps are getting more and more robust with these analytic offerings (think Tinder: swiping left or right, or dragging items across a screen)
Gamification can create efficiencies to answer up to 20-25 questions in 1 minute, but not without some disadvantages, Simmons shared, such as:
- Lack of acceptance from some traditional researchers
- Cost: these tools can be expensive
- Can distill the focus of the research and potentially reduce internal motivations
With lively discussion, many in the group came to the consensus that these types of approaches to improving surveys are coming to the industry and researchers and supplier companies will need to jump in and understand the value of change!
Catch up with the Market Research Shared Interest Group at their monthly events. Big thanks to the Wyzerr team for sharing their knowledge and to our strategic partners for helping make the monthly Market Research SIGs happen: EMI Research Solutions, BrandHub, REDI Cincinnati, and OfficeKey.
