The Marketing Power of Effort and Earned Rewards – Stonemaier Games

The Marketing Power of Effort and Earned Rewards

This weekend I helped some friends assemble a new couch. In doing so, I forever endeared myself to the couch via something called the “IKEA effect“–that is, I inherently value that couch over an identical couch that someone else assembled.

While the IKEA effect takes place post-purchase, there are similar marketing techniques designed to trigger while a customer is making the decision to buy a product: Simply ask customers to complete a small task that gets their foot in the door, connects them to the product through minimal effort, and potentially results in a better deal.

Coincidentally, this weekend I was emailing with fellow creator Wonmin Lee of Pegasus Games about the same subject. Wonmin created a short online puzzle for customers to complete; if they do, they receive free shipping on his game, Welcome to Sysifus Corp. Out of the 500 units of the game he has sold directly, 20% of customers have used the free shipping cost generated by completing the puzzle.

This is both a clever way for customers to see if they enjoy the core gameplay of the game and a great way for customers to feel invested in the game–they get to feel like they earned the free shipping reward. By enticing a potential customer to spend a few minutes on the puzzle, Wonmin increases the chance that the customer will leverage the benefit by actually using the free shipping code.

Wonmin is available to create this type of puzzle for other publishers as well (contact him at 1min@unicornwithwings.com). It doesn’t require a login, it embeds into a website, and it runs on both mobile and desktop.

Thanks to Stonemaier supporter Ryan Davis, we’ve used some slightly similar techniques for encouraging minimal effort from customers in products like Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest (discover your pirate and ship name), Viticulture World (create a wine label), and Red Rising (Institute house selection).

There’s also a little company called Amazon that uses this method to decrease cart abandonment. To apply some special coupons, Amazon asks customers for the most minimal of effort: You must click a box to get the discount.

To connect all this with crowdfunding, this is why I love Gamefound’s system of enabling creators to offer a small perk to anyone who signs up for a launch notification and also eventually backs the project. It’s a tiny effort, but you have this sense of endowed progress as a result. Live projects also often have little challenges, puzzles, and calls to action to solidify that sense of investment and to decrease cancellations.

Can you think of any examples of effort and earned rewards that have felt good to you?

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15 Comments on “The Marketing Power of Effort and Earned Rewards

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  1. Finders Seekers escape room on a box thing, have a puzzle to figure out the next location their next box will be about. These puzzles are the kind you find in their games. I do the puzzles to figure out the next place, but not their games. I live in the same town as they do, 5 or so miles from me, so I don’t think I need to pay shipping if I go pick it up… but they have to ship it.
    If their puzzle created free shipping codes, I think even though I could pick it up if they let me, I wouldn’t be losing on it.

  2. Legacy games by definition have this feeling of “making it yours” (since the point is to make permanent alterations and have each copy to be uniquely different)….

    Among those I would particularly highlight Risk Legacy: you open the box and the first thing you have to do is you have to sign a contract: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1190592/risk-legacy

    It has little effect other than to put you in the theme of the game

  3. Wonmin is quite the master at this kind of marketing maneuver. Did you see the one he did with giving tasks to potential customers, who could receive a sticker in return?

  4. The Cardboard Alchemy folks ran a series of puzzles throughout their Flamecraft campaign that drew many people into their social media community. As I recall, you just had to succeed at one of about half a dozen puzzles in order to receive a free fancy dragon mini. My wife and I ended up having a blast with all of the puzzles, and remained engaged with the Flamecraft community for the entire year of production as a result.

  5. Cool article, as usual! This is a valuable perspective as both games I am working on feature a puzzle mode.

    To an extent, this is the same kind of mechanism that relates a playtester to the game they playtested.

    It also reminds me of a (gamified) marketing operation that two friends of mine deployed for their restaurant. They placed a glass bowl full of paper flowers at a few friend shops in the neighborhood (cinemas, hotels, bike shops…). On each flower, it was written something like ‘please, bring me back to [address of the restaurant]’. The objective was clearly to bring more customers to the restaurant, but they noticed an exceptional involvement from the people who had brought the flower back. Of course, this is not a game-changing approach to marketing, but it is a nice way of turning a few cold customers directly into hot ones :)

  6. An earned reward can come from helping a friend open and punch out a game and set it up. If the opening and organizing of components is easy and intuitive, it becomes an earned reward. In addition to helping set up a game. If the box is organized and the box has some sort of managed organization, that can a reward and can endear others to your brand and product line. If a game is hard to set up and doesn’t allow for some sort of organization, that could garner bad will with potential customers.

  7. I imagine Amazon’s checkbox triggers loss aversion. So, you’ve “earned” a discount but you lose it if you don’t actually use it.

    Is that an example of a dark UX pattern? I don’t know.

    I do like the minigames or activities related to the game to endear players to it before they buy. Reading a description or looking at pictures is one thing, but finding out that you can fill out a personality quiz and that you are already similar to a character you didn’t know about before now might pique your interest.

    It would be especially nice to tie in the results of such an activity to the order form, especially if it is easy to customize something, like a label or a set of personalized stickers that comes with the game.

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