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Gamification in research and marketing with Betty Adamou
26 Plays11 months ago
**Episode Summary:**
In this enlightening episode, we dive deep into the world of gamification with the renowned expert, designer, and author, Betty Adamou. Discover how gamification is revolutionizing market research, marketing strategies, and customer engagement through innovative approaches and technologies.
**Guest Bio:**
Betty Adamou is a pioneer in gamification, having introduced the concept of Research Games. Her work focuses on making data collection more engaging, improving the quality of insights gathered through market research.
**Highlights of the Episode:**
- **Journey into Gamification:** Betty shares her personal and professional journey that led her to gamify research and data collection, creating a new paradigm in the process.
- **The Concept of Research Games:** An in-depth look at how Betty's invention is transforming the landscape of market research by making it more engaging and fun for participants.
- **Solving Engagement Problems:** Discussion on the challenges of traditional survey methods and how gamification provides solutions to increase response rates and data quality.
- **Applications in Marketing and Advertising:** Insights into how gamification is being utilized beyond research, especially in creating compelling marketing and advertising strategies that captivate audiences.
- **Future of Gamification:** Betty offers her predictions on the future developments in gamification, emphasizing its growing importance in various sectors.
**Recommended Resources:**
- Betty Adamou's book on gamification https://amzn.to/3UJsrVN
- Research through Gaming website for more insights into gamification in market research https://gamesandgamification.com/
**Connect with Betty Adamou:**
- LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/bettyadamou/
- website https://www.bettyadamou.com/
**Closing Thoughts:**
This episode not only sheds light on the power of gamification in research and marketing but also inspires listeners to think creatively about engaging their audiences. Betty Adamou's pioneering work exemplifies how gamification can lead to more meaningful interactions and valuable data collection.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Host
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, you're back with the untitled SEO podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Laws of the SEO. I am the senior owner of white hair and not the owner of enough teeth, which isn't going to make sense unless you see a picture of me one day, but it explains some of the essays.
00:00:16
Speaker
Yes, I don't have all my teeth because I've led an adventureful life. But this isn't a podcast about my dental work. This is a podcast about getting to know people in the field of digital marketing. And I've spoken to several SEO people recently, and other people who I think was very directly part of digital marketing. But then I met somebody at a 4N networking meeting very recently.
00:00:40
Speaker
And when she told the room what she did, my little ears stood up on stalks. I think I'm getting my metaphors mixed up there. And I thought, oh, I definitely need to speak to this person.
Guest Introduction: Betty Ademou
00:00:52
Speaker
So honoured guest, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Thank you, Andrew. What a lovely intro. So I'm Betty Ademou and I am a Gamification expert designer and author. And I'm really, really happy to be on the podcast.
00:01:07
Speaker
You're very kind. So I have to know straight off the bat and I have to pretend that I don't already know the answer.
Betty's Journey into Gamification
00:01:15
Speaker
But how did you get into gamification? I know how long you've been doing it and did you invent it? It's a bold question I know. I didn't invent gamification but I invented a little corner of it.
00:01:33
Speaker
which segues into the other answer that you're seeking, which is kind of how I got into it and what I've been doing. So I found myself being at the London College of Fashion. And for anybody listening, they're like, how on earth is this relevant? But I promise it will make sense.
00:01:50
Speaker
So without the undercoach fashion, I grew up wanting to be a fashion designer. So without the undercoach fashion, and was also working part time at a several row tailors, if you can believe it as an apprentice, so really enjoying myself and made clothes at home. So, you know, very early on, as a young woman, it's obvious that I have a lot of artistic talent, but a very engineering kind of
00:02:15
Speaker
way of being, I like to break things and make things and use my hand in that way and be creative in that way. But I was absolutely broke after finishing university, like most people are. And literally just, you know, I was living on my own, on top of a Turkish restaurant in the town I was living in Enfield. And a friend of mine said, Look, you know, there's a market research firm, literally down the road, you know, you can walk there within six minutes,
00:02:45
Speaker
you know, we're all about the same age here and you know, we have a lot of fun here. And I didn't really know much about market research to be completely honest. But you know, it was there for a stable, full time job and I could pay the rent. So okay, I go off to this company, and I start working in market research. And I guess you could say that that was my first career job. And it became really obvious really quickly.
Challenges in Market Research Surveys
00:03:10
Speaker
that there is an engagement problem when people take part in online surveys, because that was part of my job to run recent projects, you know, to put out these surveys, get the data back, analyse that data, feed that back to the client, they go off and make whatever their business decisions are going to be.
00:03:27
Speaker
And so I ended up staying in market research for a little while, but seeing the problem from different facets, because I started off at what you might call a field work company. So these are people that manage projects that are for research out in the field. And then I went to the software side. So how do people script and code these surveys? What's some of the kind of data and the analytics behind, you know, the software behind all that work?
00:03:57
Speaker
And again, the problem is still there, you know, and it boggles my mind in all honesty, Andrew, that there's all these really intelligent people working in market research from the people that are talking directly to participants right the way through to people designing the software, designing the surveys. And everyone recognizes there's a problem with participant engagement.
00:04:19
Speaker
But no one really addressing the crux of the issue, which is that surveys look really, really boring, and are really, really boring. And so, you know, you did you did and back then you did get a lot of people who were interested in enhancing the look and feel of a survey, right, making them more user friendly, and address the better kind of UI, overall, you know, adaptation for mobile and things like that. But
00:04:49
Speaker
Again, that's very, as you know, right, it's it's superficial, you know, unless there's a good design and engagement going on and design engagement going on the background, it's all just, you know, well, the classic thing is I can remember everyone thinking the world's problems were solved when apps like SurveyMonkey came out.
00:05:11
Speaker
Like I'm thinking it just, it just makes things look prettier. It doesn't actually change, doesn't change the way, you know, you might have kind of workflows or not workflows, you know, flowcharts where if they answer this, you can take them down this path, but it doesn't actually solve the biggest problem, which is that you send surveys out to people and the initial response is so what?
00:05:31
Speaker
And then if the survey's designed badly, then the response a few minutes into it is, I don't want to do this anymore. That they still are the biggest issues, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So you've got research suppliers and research buyers who recognize these issues with what we call
00:05:52
Speaker
you know low response rates high dropout rates so those are people as you described through about halfway through they're dropping out and these these rates are measured to the nth degree and then of course what you then have is a massive domino effect because if people
00:06:08
Speaker
see a survey in their email inbox, for example, and they're just not opening it, right? Then the research supplier is then spending more time and resources sending out even more emails, and that's got a cost to it.
00:06:23
Speaker
And then, of course, if somebody takes part in a survey and drops out halfway through welding, you've got to send more emails out with more surveys to kind of re-qualify other groups. Anyway, it's an awful domino effect that I talk about quite extensively in my book, which is, of course, over my shoulder here. Oh, I see it, yeah.
Innovative Solutions: Gamification in Surveys
00:06:42
Speaker
But yeah, I was just having this really, I guess you could say, serendipitous experience where I was going home from work, working at the software side of research,
00:06:53
Speaker
going home from work, playing World of Warcraft until three in the morning, and not eating, you know, as is typical with people very addicted to video games. And just sort of thinking, well, what is it that makes me want to play on this screen, engage with this screen for hours on end, but people don't want to do a half an hour survey. But then of course, we can make those comparisons with everything in life, right? Why do people play video games for hours, but
00:07:22
Speaker
you know, they don't want to sit down and do their homework for an hour. Why do people play video games happily all day, but you know, people are disengaged in the workplace, right and don't do assignments on fun or whatever it might be. Um, so anyway, I wrote a research paper called the future of research for gaming and it was about you know, saying, what is an idea? Why don't we
00:07:46
Speaker
apply gaming techniques and incorporate more playful elements in surveys, and start to build in some context, right? And I presented that paper at a conference in Las Vegas, got a standing ovation, that was very nice. And then after that, there was a lot of people who were like, well, you've now got to go and do this thing, because you've put the idea out there. And you know, you can check to watch in five minutes, somebody else is gonna go and do it.
00:08:15
Speaker
So I left the company I was at, and I started research through gaming, as was the sort of name of that paper that I've presented. And then went from there, but but you know, really seriously dedicated years of my life to studying what makes something engaging, right in a general sense, but in a digital sense as well. And how can we also prove
00:08:40
Speaker
that someone is engaged because that's the other thing, isn't it? Is to evidence engagement, is to evidence the difference between someone's participation in a certain product and service, but then how that's changed or been transformed through adding a gamification approach.
00:08:58
Speaker
So I made an effort to study what is engagement and to study gamification and as a designer incorporated those things that I was learning in my work and then went on to design what I call research games and that's the name of my invention is research games. Absolutely, you want to talk more about research games but
00:09:19
Speaker
I said at the start of this episode, I've been speaking to people in SEO and then sort of intimating that you're not, you're not an SEO professional, which I hope you're not offended, but we both know you're not. But one of the things that really gets keeps me interested in SEO is that it always, good SEO always follows good practice. And good practice always follows new thinking, or the clarification
00:09:48
Speaker
and focusing in on good practice or good ideas.
Gamification's Impact on SEO and Usability
00:09:52
Speaker
And one of the things that we look at a lot in SEO is how easy is it to use a website? Because ultimately, it doesn't matter how many people you get to your website, if Google sees lots of people arriving at your website and then napping off again, they kind of go, well, your website can't be that interesting. And it's not bounce rate. Ignore that if you've ever heard it.
00:10:16
Speaker
But it's how do people engage with your website? And of course, Google knows because almost everybody has Google Analytics installed on the website. So Google knows exactly how well people interact. And it's always become a cliche to say, you know, you have to guide people through your website has to be a user journey. I mean, there does, it's not wrong. But the more I speak to you, Betty, the more I think that is, in a sense,
00:10:43
Speaker
a type of gamification. Is it or am I wildly off the mark here? With the most kind approach, Andrew, you are off the mark.
00:10:54
Speaker
gamification and good gamification design is about all of those elements of great user experience, great user interaction, having some element of journey and story. I mean, if we think about any video games that we've ever played, there's actually a huge amount going on
00:11:14
Speaker
that we might not necessarily think about. There might be music and sound effects that serve to engage us or warn us when we're entering a certain dangerous territory. There's obviously the visual effects. There is the ease in which we understand and access the instructions and the rules to play the game. There are teams of people
00:11:39
Speaker
whose literal focus is to ensure that you are engaged from start to finish. And I think if everybody approached their life and their business and their work with the mindset of a game designer, we would very likely find that our approaches look very, very different.
00:11:59
Speaker
at the end, because to be a game designer means that you're also trying to create different types of values for the user. And when I was studying games and trying to kind of understand what is it that we get out of games, you know, there's all sorts about self-determination theory, but there's four things that I wanted to share with you, Andrew, that I think would be really interesting and apply not just in going with patient, but in everything.
00:12:24
Speaker
the four values are number one, self discovery values, right, when we play games, we often learn something about ourselves. So, and other people even, right, so we might realise, Oh, actually, I am, you know, a lot more competitive than I thought I was, or
00:12:45
Speaker
This game has helped me discover how quickly I can progress through challenges. Or maybe we've understood that I'm more inclined to cheat and take shortcuts than I thought I was. So games give us a lot of self-discovery value. They also give us a lot of transcendent value. So often in games where part of big worlds, where part of something bigger than ourselves,
00:13:08
Speaker
So, you know, in the lowest sense, it's about saving the princess because she's up in a tower. So we know that whenever we are Super Mario and we're defeating turtles, whatever it might be, it's because of, you know, this bigger cause, right? And games like World of Warcraft are great at that, right? Because you're doing all these questions, you're literally part of the world of Warcraft. I mean, it doesn't get bigger than that. But games also give us narrative value. There's often a story that continues to unfold. And we love stories. And of course, storytelling is such a
00:13:38
Speaker
massive buzzword anyway, but we also get knowledge values. And I've got mates who have joked that they've learned more about geography and politics through playing video games than, you know, just being a person that exists through life. So if you have got anything, whether it's a survey, a website, an employee training exercise,
00:14:02
Speaker
I think it's really useful to think about how can I add one or all of those four different value systems to make that process as engaging and value driven as possible for the user. And that's what game designers do, because all of those value systems are so baked into games.
00:14:22
Speaker
But we don't often break it down and think of it like that because not all of us are interested in maybe the academic side or whatever. And that's why people just have fun with games. But I really made it my job to go, what on earth is it that makes games so intrinsically engaging? And then almost trying to take those ingredients and mechanics and then add those into things.
00:14:43
Speaker
that aren't games. And that's essentially what gamification is, right? It's taking those maybe intrinsic or some of those more superficial elements of games, like leaderboards, point systems and adding those to things that aren't games. So we've got, you know, Duolingo, Bitbit counts to 5k. Even Weight Watchers, these are all examples of gamification, but we might not think of it as such, because we don't know the word or we've not made that connection necessarily.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, I like it. I can see how it applies to so many things. So self-discovery, transcendent value, narrative value, knowledge value. So how does that... I mean, we're talking about surveys, which obviously just one part of market research. Can you run us through those four facets with regards to if you just want to learn something about your potential audience? Let's make it really simple.
00:15:37
Speaker
If you want to learn something about the customers you already have, how would those four parts, what considerations would you want to make right at the start of the process?
00:15:49
Speaker
way to answer that, Andrew, is to give you an example of a project. So I worked for a number of years with the University of Surrey. And as all universities and businesses do, they want to find out more about the consumers and segment their consumers, you know, that you might have a student persona, consumer persona, kind of stuff. And so what they wanted to understand was how many
00:16:17
Speaker
prospective students fall under a certain persona. And so they produce year on year, again, as all universities do, a survey that is a segmentation study for what segment does a particular participant fall into.
00:16:35
Speaker
and you know all brands have all sorts of names for these different segments and things like that so it's not just as simple as the millennial segment or the boomer segment you know they've got their own words or whatever as did the University of Surrey and when they first spoke to me as many of my clients do
00:16:51
Speaker
they kind of phone with a lot of frustration. And it's, you know, the story is always the same as, you know, we've been putting out this survey for a while, we're just not getting the response rate and the quality of data that we would really like to see, we'd like to, you know, have a look at what you do. And so one of the first questions I asked was, so okay, in the traditional survey that you've done, when you find out the the students persona, who sees that data? And I said, Well, we do, you know, it's it's
00:17:21
Speaker
you know, the persona that comes out at the back end, and you know, we see that, but the student doesn't. So that was the first thing that needed to change was, okay, well, people are taking part in your survey, let them see what their kind of persona type or profile type is at the end, that's going to completely change the approach.
Success Story: University of Surrey Project
00:17:42
Speaker
So rather than it being, here's a survey from the university, sorry, please take part, this will take no longer than 15 minutes,
00:17:48
Speaker
because we're trying to find out more about prospective students, yada, yada, yada, yada. Now it became, take part in this survey and see what kind of student you are. Suddenly, there's self-discovery value, right? And knowledge value. Suddenly, I now have something I'm going to get out of it, and it makes me want to take part. And it was a really straightforward form of very, I would say, very simple game citation. So people answered something like 17, 18 questions.
00:18:17
Speaker
And because of the algorithm that was at the back end developed by the University of Surrey and one of their other partners, we were able to spit out what their profile type was pertaining to their answers.
00:18:31
Speaker
The level of engagement was completely transformed to the point that the University of Surrey commissioned that for four years. The survey quiz, research game, whatever you want to call it, was on the homepage of their website at one point. And from a below 10% response rate at its highest,
00:18:50
Speaker
we had a 95% 95. So complete transformation. And in one day alone, we got over 1500 completing their post, you know, getting their profile type. And these were not
00:19:06
Speaker
financially incentivized research participants. As is usually the case, right? People usually give them like, you know, 50p or a dollar, whatever it might be to do a survey. So there was no financial incentive here because the investment is in the value that they're going to get out of it.
00:19:24
Speaker
And you know, and that's one simple way. And, you know, it relates to a lot of these sort of BuzzFeed quizzes that we see around, you know, Andrew, I'm sure you've seen this, like, you might get a Facebook quiz, what kind of Disney Princess for you, what Game of Thrones for you. It's kind of using those kind of principles to self-discovery value, right? But for other research games I've designed, I might incorporate more of those value systems. I might say, okay, well, actually,
00:19:52
Speaker
what you're doing in this survey is part of a much bigger cause and really articulate in simple terms to the participants how their contribution is helping something else in a positive way. But crucially, give them some feedback and an idea of progress so they can see their contribution go further.
00:20:20
Speaker
These are, you know, in a way, this stuff isn't rocket science, right? But then on the other hand, people are not doing it enough. And then we've got, you know, people not taking part in surveys. So then they're not. And I think that that kind of being part of a wider thing, something is, is something that anyone in marketing or any business can no longer ignore. Because for a long time, there's there's been this sort of it's always become a cliche that we're millennials, baby boomers and Gen X, like me, allegedly motivated by value and money.
00:20:51
Speaker
How much is it going to cost or how much money are you going to get? What value am I going to get? All kind of quite selfish, but millennials.
00:20:58
Speaker
The theory goes, they buy according to, am I going to be a part of something? Is what I'm doing going to make the world a better place? So this kind of self-discovery thing, I think if companies aren't thinking about it now, outside of market research, it's a real mistake. I'm finding it very easy to sort of relate a lot of these things you're talking about very directly to any aspect of digital marketing.
00:21:24
Speaker
the combination of your view of the world through all the work and all the academic stuff and all the practical application of gamification aligns perfectly with all digital marketing. Well thank you and it explains why my best-selling workshop is my gamification in advertising the marketing workshop.
00:21:46
Speaker
even though my book was about market reasons. But you know, there is the other element to think about that we don't just take part in games, we play games, right. And to play also has really useful value in marketing or training in education or market research online surveys. Because when we play, we are at our most creative, we can can, you know, share ideas in a way that feels safe, it doesn't feel like they're
00:22:16
Speaker
is, you know, judgment or failure, you know, we're allowed to kind of harness our imaginations and the sense of role play. And if we think about a lot of brands, especially a lot of luxury and aspirational brands, right, who want you to imagine wearing that Louis Vuitton suit, want you to imagine wearing those Jimmy Choo shoes, well actually incorporating a playful experience
00:22:42
Speaker
in that brand interaction really makes sense because now I feel that I can be creative and imagine myself, you know, in the future wearing these garments in a way that feels safe and collaborative and creative. And the other element as well is also brands are constantly seeking ideas and collaboration from from their consumers. And play is very creative and collaborative. So that's another reason to harness gamification so that you can get that kind of
00:23:11
Speaker
level of engagement interaction in that way. Because, you know, the one way marketing messages that we see are so easy to ignore. And ad avoidance is a big deal, you know, we get the YouTube ads and the TV ads and we click through and we scroll and we skip and whatever. Whereas games demand your interactions, don't they? They are two way media. So
00:23:38
Speaker
even just in the lightest way, if I was to say to you, Andrew, like next time I see in person, race you to the door, there's gonna be part of you that wants to race me to the door, right? Even though we're both grown adults, right? Because it's the invitation to play, we can't resist. And so that's,
00:23:58
Speaker
You know, I think in a nutshell, you know, gamification really is synonymous with engagement. And I think this is something that people maybe don't fully understand. But I'm not saying that your audience doesn't, but that people might think, oh, gamification is just about making something fun. Well, actually, gamification is about solving an engagement problem. And in the process, especially if done digitally, you can also collect valuable data because games are also inherently
00:24:30
Speaker
You've boggled my mind because one of the big problems with SEO is people don't write title tags properly. So the titles that they give pages tend to be a statement of fact. They miss the opportunity to use the title of their page as a marketing piece.
00:24:51
Speaker
But I think more than that and more direct and easier to test than that is the headlines and descriptions used in Google ads, because people are still writing Google ads. I've got some really good copyrights. I would say that I've got some great copy or ad copyright who works with a guy called Lewis Volkart, who sort of gets approaches things from a more playful angle. But the whole thing that people are still trying to get people to go from an advert to a purchase.
00:25:21
Speaker
And if one of the goals of selling online is to build trust and to build an affinity with a brand in people's minds, if you were to put in an extra step and instead of going from clicking on an advert to purchasing, but clicking on the advert to a game or a score app or something like that, then surely that's an opportunity to still present the people with the hey, here's this thing, now buy it. But at the end of a journey.
00:25:50
Speaker
that gets them to buy into your brand so much stronger. That's what's blowing my mind. It's one of those things. I've kind of thought about it before, but you've cemented the ideas. You've made them sort of more tangible, especially with this self-discovery, transcendent value, narrative value, knowledge value.
00:26:08
Speaker
Yeah, I don't wish that you were spelled. Yeah, I couldn't find a mnemonic for that. There's a lovely example I want to share with you, Andrew, that I think really kind of brings that that
00:26:22
Speaker
idea of kind of going from ad to sale and kind of coming to life using gamification. So I was running with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, this is from years ago now, I was running one of my gamification in marketing workshops. So it's about two and a half hours, you know, I start off explaining what gamification is, the science or psychology, I show examples from around the world, you know, here's how it's been used in,
00:26:44
Speaker
in getting fit and exercising and dieting, learning new languages, but then of course I bring in examples in marketing. And I challenge the people in the room to work on a gamification design to solve a problem that maybe they're having in their business, right? And this fellow that was there who runs a small tiling business of all things, right? He runs a tiny business. And one of the problems that he says he always has with every client is
00:27:15
Speaker
that they always get really shocked at the price. And then he has to expend his time and energy explaining what goes into tiling a floor, that it's not just you buy the tiles and they stick them down and that's it, right? That there's a lot more to it and there's several steps and you need different levels of expertise or whatever. So for his gamification approach, he wanted to solve this problem. So his idea
00:27:42
Speaker
And he's kind of, you know, the task is to design a gamified approach in 20 minutes when I time it, right? His idea was to create a tile or floor game to build empathy and trust between him and his customers.
00:27:58
Speaker
So his idea was that level one, you've got like a really small bathroom floor to tile, right? And you do that and you do it well and then you go on to level two. And by the time you get to like level five, you're tiling like a massive courtyard or something like that, right?
00:28:16
Speaker
And you can pick materials and things like that. But crucially, when you pick the different materials to lay down these tiles, those different materials come with different needs for screed and concrete and all sorts of things I don't know about right. And he was so excited at this idea that if people were to play this game, they could not only enjoy that and you know, it positions his brand is quite innovative with this cool game. But by the time he comes to responding to their inquiry,
00:28:46
Speaker
to give a quote, they have probably had a lot more idea of what it takes than all different things to consider when tiling a floor. And so that's another thing I really love about gamification is the ability that games give us to build empathy and to build trust. There's a wonderful game example, and I'm afraid I don't know what it's called, but basically in this game, you are a black woman,
00:29:15
Speaker
And you've got all of these hands trying to touch your hair, which is unfortunately a thing that a lot of black women have to contend with people going, I love your hair, can I touch it? And then without hearing yes or no, they go and touch it anyway. And I can imagine that that's quite invasive and annoying. I think if people ask me if they could touch my hair all the time, I'd get
00:29:35
Speaker
pissed off pretty quickly. So in this game, you have to bat away these hands as they come up to you at increasingly, you know, higher levels of speed, right? And that's because, you know, games get more challenging as you play them. And so you can play a game like that for just a few minutes. And you can pretty much, you know, get the hint really quickly, how annoying that is. So games are so good at putting us in the shoes of someone else. So if you
00:30:03
Speaker
you know, for whatever, you know, if you're listening, and you've got a business problem, an engagement problem in your business somewhere along the line, where it's that onboarding stage, whether it's in the initial advertising, whatever it might be, see if you can approach your problem like a game designer, like, like my friend with the tiles, right, and and and see if that can make a difference. You know, there's no there's no harm in trying.
00:30:30
Speaker
It's, if I'm ever, who's listened to this podcast before, if I'm this quiet throughout a podcast, it's because, it's because my brain is just gone whoosh, it's just gone absolutely fitting off in one direction. And I said before about Google ads or, you know, online advertising and gamefication, just being just the perfect bedfellows. I think I go a step further and the whole of inbound marketing, it absolutely should be
00:30:59
Speaker
shouldn't know the principles of gamification. I've just read a brilliant book by someone called Marcus Sheridan called They Ask You Answer. I've just started giving it to my clients because it's the best explanation of inbound marketing I've ever read. It is just like build trust. People have questions and before they give you money, you have to build trust with them.
Emotional Connections through Gamification
00:31:21
Speaker
Gamification is
00:31:23
Speaker
I'm not putting it, I'm not finding the words because my brain's still trying to figure it out, but it just seems like so obvious. It just seems so, so obvious. And I've been, I've been doing inbound marketing for over 20 years, but that just kind of hang on. Why don't we make it fun, especially if it reflects the brand? Because if your brand, I mean, if you're a funeral director, you might not, you know, how many corpses can you fling into an incinerator in a set time? Although probably that might work.
00:31:52
Speaker
But saying that saying that there are a lot of, you know, serious games that do that do deal with some really tough subjects. I played a video game called that dragon cancer. This is this is years ago now. And so I'm taking this down like a really sad road. But basically two parents, man and man and wife had a young boy who had cancer. And
00:32:22
Speaker
they created a game to show what that experience was like, the good times in between and the moments of hope, and the sad times. And you play this game, I don't mind telling you, I absolutely fooled my eyes out. Now I am child free, but I could play this game and completely empathise with what these parents are going through.
00:32:48
Speaker
And, you know, there's other games as well. There's a game I haven't played but I was reading about in a fantastic book by a woman called Catherine Spitzer called Emotion Matters, games that move us or something for that effect. But Catherine Spitzer is my name.
00:33:04
Speaker
And she wrote about a game where you your challenge to help your baby go to sleep, but you're hearing increasingly loud noises outside because you are in a war zone. And so again, that's building empathy about what's going on with people who are living in this situation, perhaps creating more empathy for people who are fleeing these situations and are refugees in other countries. And that's often the side of things that we don't see.
00:33:31
Speaker
So there are a lot of serious subjects out there that are tearful, that are tragic, and people might think that you're making lighter things by using a game, but actually a game can be a fantastic platform to empathize and to be emotionally invested. The other thing to consider is that real emotional investment because
00:33:53
Speaker
And I'm sure you've played games, you've seen other people play games, when we play games, we have a real physiological reaction. You know, we throw the controller because we're pissed off and frustrated or our hands go up like this, because finally we've done it. Finally, we've beaten the Sentinel in the Harry Potter game, which is the recent thing I did. So we have a real emotional response and investment. So if we take it back to the commercial world of branding,
00:34:21
Speaker
Well, brands do want their consumers to be emotionally linked, right? And especially through COVID, where people were obviously not going into shops, having those branded experiences with the candles going off in the background and the music and, you know, meeting the staff or whatever. So, so something like a gamified marketing approach can work really well.
00:34:47
Speaker
at extending that brand experience, building emotion in a brand when you don't maybe have the luxury of visiting a physical location. There's so many questions in my mind. And I really enjoyed talking to you. I mean, we've met before, and we've had a chat before, so I knew a little bit.
00:35:13
Speaker
I'm going to stop it there, partly because the longer you talk, the more my brain fills up with potential and ideas and things. And I need to draw a line under that somewhere, but we're also gone slightly over time. But I didn't want to cut you down because you were just giving more and more value. So I really appreciate you for how much value you brought to this, Betty. This is an absolutely fascinating subject. And I think it's one that
00:35:41
Speaker
Nobody should ignore now. Games, it just, it suddenly seems so obvious to me. So thank you for helping the scales fall from my eyes and bring some clarity to my eyes. It's a pleasure. And, you know, honestly, if you, well, if you ever want to have another chat about this stuff, then, you know, I'm happy, as you can imagine, I'm happy to talk about this today. But, you know, also, if you've got any listeners that feel that they want to
00:36:11
Speaker
experiment, they want to have a go.
Further Engagement and Contact Information
00:36:14
Speaker
I've got workshops, I've got project coaching, design consultation, so there's a myriad of ways to engage if you fancy having a go and getting some guidance. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Send me an email, send me an email, I'll give you a call. Hello at bettyadamoo.com
00:36:36
Speaker
Superb. I'll put web address and whatever in the show notes, of course. So just remains to be say thank you ever so much, Betty. This has been very, very enjoyable in a way that's going to cause me lots of work, but very good fun work. OK, well, that's a good problem to have. Well, thank you for having me again. Absolutely. OK, so I'm going to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye? Yes, bye. Thank you and bye.