Abstract
The fact that businesses begin to reach consumers through online media and digital channels triggers consumers to experience new experiences. Therefore, creating new experiences for consumers in the online environment and determining which factors affect consumer experiences in the online environment gain importance for marketing managers in determining forward-looking strategies. With the digital transformation experienced, the game industry's becoming an increasingly important market has enabled the concept of games to become a marketing tool. This affects consumer behavior, experience, and satisfaction. So, one way to create new experiences for consumers online is to use games and new digital marketing tools integrated into the game concept. From this point of view, in this chapter, game market, game concept, game experience, gamification, product placement advergame, flow theory, and motivation theory will be discussed in terms of experiential marketing.
TopIntroduction
With digitalization, businesses and consumers can directly communicate and interact in marketing activities. In addition, various campaigns and advertising messages can be carried out interactively, sometimes with the participation of consumers, and consumers are rewarded for fulfilling various tasks. It makes communication between businesses and consumers much more enjoyable and effective. Consumers feel similarly while playing games. Many activities such as completing the tasks given in the game, rewarding and appreciating the consumers who enter the game rankings through competitions and similar events, and giving the target audience a sense of competition and excitement take place while playing the game. Consumers share the online game content they are interested in by tagging their close friends on their social media accounts and announcing this content on their social media accounts. This interest of consumers in online games makes the gaming industry more and more popular.
Seeing that the game industry is becoming more and more popular and wanting to continue its marketing activities on digital platforms, businesses have started to benefit from the game industry for their marketing activities. More and more businesses are adding gaming apps to their marketing activities. With digital marketing, the analysis and measurability of consumer data and campaigns make game content a suitable marketing tool to deliver the right message to the right consumer. Research shows that games and gamification activities are more effective in reaching consumers than traditional marketing and other digital marketing activities (Hofacker et al., 2016). From this point of view, it can be stated that the use of the game element in the marketing activities of the enterprises will provide essential opportunities and competitive advantage so that the consumers can cooperate with the brands they know and trust.
This book chapter examines how businesses are using game-based experiential marketing practices, taking the core gaming experience from an experiential marketing perspective. To this end, this book chapter consists of an introduction, background, main focus of the chapter, solutions, and recommendations, future research directions, and conclusions.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Gamification: Using game design elements, gameplay mechanics, aesthetics, and game thinking to accomplish various purposes.
Product Placement: It is the process of integrating branded products or services into entertainment programs such as movies and games in a non-commercial way, with the aim of influencing the target audience in order to generate commercial returns.
Advergame: A form of entertainment-oriented advertising that combines advertising and game concepts, includes brands or logos embedded in games, and the player can access these marketing tools through businesses' web sites or applications.
AR-VR Games: The way online games are played with virtual and/or augmented reality (VR/AR) equipment.