Extraordinary Gamification Examples That Changed the Food & Beverage Industry (Part 1)

Extraordinary Gamification Examples That Changed the Food & Beverage Industry (Part 1)

Gamification is no longer a buzzword. Over the years, more and more businesses have adopted creative ways to engage their customers and employees by applying Gamification and Human-Focused Design (design optimized for human motivation rather than functional efficiency within the system).

As a worldwide leading company in Gamification consulting, we take pleasure in seeing companies use Gamification to create engagement. Not all of these have reached high levels of long-term engagement (or Octalysis level ROIs), but we are still happy to share some good gamification examples of companies in the Food & Beverage Industry that succeeded in gaining a competitive advantage with some Gamification design. For other service areas have a look here.

Check them out and see for yourself the impact that even limited-designed solutions have on large businesses.

Domino’s Pizza: Pizza Hero

Another interesting example of Gamification in the Food & Beverage Industry is the Pizza Hero app where players take the role of a pizza maker and are challenged to use their hands to make perfect pizzas. The pizza making game not only allows users to create pizzas but also order them to their homes. If they have great pizza making skills they can even get a job at Domino’s!

Even though the Pizza Hero experience was developed purely for fun, the results were astonishing and included increased sales revenue by 30%. There were over 7 million pizzas created through the app that at the time ranked #3 on the app store with 300K downloads.

We believe that the success of the app was mostly attributed to a design that includes:
• Domino’s gives users the feeling of progress and improvements through awarding them points also scoring how well pizzas were made. Furthermore, as users become more and more skillful in making pizzas that makes them feel like they learned and mastered new skills (Core Drive 2: Development and Accomplishment)
• As users create their pizzas they feel greater ownership of them and pride their abilities (Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession)

Design that focuses on giving users progress, status, and a feeling of ownership will impact your short term bottom line, as it relies on extrinsic motivation.

Chipotle’s: The Scarecrow

Another Gamification example in Food & Beverage is the American restaurant chain Chipotle. Chipotle wanted to push ethical food sourcing in a fun and engaging way. To do this the company released a free game and an animated short film called “The Scarecrow”.

The video follows the workday of the Scarecrow and shows how he is sad when witnessing, for example, a robotic crow injecting a chicken to promote expansion and cows being held captive in small boxes while machines milk them forcefully. At the end of the day, the Scarecrow harvests only vegetables and opens a burrito stand. Above the stand, there is a banner with a sign “Cultivate a Better World” implying that Chipotle is a virtuous product.

In this way, Chipotle truly utilized Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling to motivate customers to buy products that are not harmful and join the mission to change the world for the better.

The Scarecrow became the number one adventure game in the App Store. In the first month of the campaign, The Scarecrow sparked 18.4 million conversations across 17 social platforms, with a 92.7 social sentiment score.
It also replaced Taco Bell as the top fast-food brand in the US and the campaign won a Cannes Lions award in 2014.

4 Food

4food is an American socially networked and socially responsible fast-food restaurant that provides food that is infinitely customizable. In 4Food there is no menu but customers can create and share their own sandwich creations.

According to research, the menu offers more than 96 billion customizable burger options. Once customers have designed their ideal burger, they can share it on Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter and earn real money. When somebody else orders their custom burger, the creator gets a 25-cent credit towards their next meal and can be listed on a leaderboard. This makes 4Food a unique socially driven experience that is not only designed to create engagement but also leads to higher sales.

Looking at the 4Food model through the lens of The Octalysis Framework and our experience as Gamification consultants we can analyze why it was such a success.

Octalysis Gamification consulting

4Food utilizes Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback (Core Drive 3) by allowing clients to create a customizable burger with an almost infinite number of options. This makes clients feel powerful, fulfilled, satisfied and most importantly in control of their own choices while at the same time makes the process enjoying and fun to do. This also motivates users to come back and try another burger combination which creates long-term motivation.

By designing your own burger (rather than just ordering it at the cashier), customers also experience Core Drive 4: Ownership and Possession. The more effort they put into designing their burger the more they will value 4Food.

Progressing on the leaderboard leads to feelings of accomplishment (Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment) and receiving votes from other burger lovers adds more feeling of success. The realization that they created the best burger is something that many participants would really take pride in.

4Food also utilizes Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness by allowing users to share, comment and vote on burgers that have been created by others. At the same time, this also creates a unique social environment where burger lovers can connect, share, even compete which makes people even more involved in the 4Food experience, strengthens the brand and increase consumption. Quite good, don’t you think?

These were just 3 Extraordinary Gamification Examples in the Food & Beverage Industry. For more Gamification examples check out Part Two of the series and continue to follow our blog.

Are you curious to find out how we can help to design a truly engaging experience for your organization? Do you want to know how we can help you design a high ROI Gamification design?

Don’t worry, we can help. As leading experts in Gamification consulting The Octalysis Group has a long and proven track record of creating high ROI engagement designs.

Contact us for a FREE consultation.

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