Consumer surveys have evolved over the years, with the transition from traditional research methodologies such as mail and telephone surveys to enhanced experiential surveys.
More specifically, experiential and online surveys continue to further adapt to consumer technology trends with shopping receipt surveys, mobile optimized surveys, and recently gamification.
Gamification is the concept of incorporating gaming elements into other activities, often for businesses. The main idea behind gamification is to create a more positive or fun experience for the targeted respondents.
In market research, gamification has countless applications within experiential surveys. In this post, we'll discuss what shape gamification takes in market research studies and what businesses stand to gain by using it.
Create a winning market research study with gamification by incorporating a layer of fun and interaction for respondents.
Benefits of gamification in experiential surveys
We've heard it before. "Why would I go to the trouble of making questions more like a game for respondents, if standard questions collect the same feedback?"
There are a few key advantages that make gamification worth the effort.
To start, gamification methods make the research experience more interactive than just a question and answer style for respondents. It would be easy to make a survey in which a respondent just ticked boxes twenty times in a row, but you have to consider respondent engagement.
A respondent seeing the same format, page after page is bound to lose interest and in turn compromise the data quality. Gamification elements elevate a survey experience to escape the more repetitive, traditional flow.
Furthermore, if survey participants are contacted for follow-up interviews, a positive experience will encourage respondents to keep participating in the research. Gamification in experiential surveys will help respondents associate your brand with being fun or creative.
For many respondents, gamification makes questions easier to understand. Visual learners can benefit from the recognition of elements like drag and drop or image selection. Again, this contributes to a more positive experience for respondents.
Using gamification in qualitative research
While only recently being used in market research studies as a whole, gamification has been a part of focus groups and in-person interviews for a long time. These qualitative market research methodologies frequently include activities for participants to help capture information.
It is common to see at least a couple of respondent participation activities in longer qualitative research sessions to keep participants engaged. Some examples include writing on index cards, voting on topics, and physically ranking services or brands.
For example, a marketing agency is updating their logo after 15 years in business. The marketing agency chooses to conduct focus group research to guide their decision of what logo best represents their brand based on audience feedback.
At a focus group facility, a moderator shows participants a number of different logos
to understand what logo is most and least appealing as well as further implications of making this change such as brand recognition or confusion.
Using gamification in quantitative research
Gamification has more recently been adopted into quantitative research methods such as online surveys. It is now easier than ever for researchers to program gaming elements into questions through survey management platforms equipped with user friendly options for question creation.
Our market research firm, for example, uses a survey management tool that offers question types such as:
- Slide scales
- Star rating grids
- Drag and drop
- Image selection
Even more so, studies attracting younger generation participants find the use of video or audio capture capabilities particularly powerful survey feature types.
Depending on the information you are looking for, the questions in a survey can also be organized in a format that calculates a score. Think of testing awareness of local businesses or product usage. The scores of participants can be compared to other survey respondents and aggregate in real-time to spark engagement.
Drive Research is a market research company located in Syracuse, NY. Our team of experts has the tools and experience to design a customized market research project with gamification.
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