Burger King just lately launched a brand new online game for its seventieth birthday referred to as Balloon Burst that gave members of the chain’s Royal Perks loyalty program a possibility to enter a sweepstakes and earn factors. Balloon Burst arrived only a month after the QSR supplied the Cloud Float sport for 4 weeks to advertise its new Frozen Cotton Sweet beverage.
These examples mirror the important thing function video games play in Burger King’s advertising and marketing technique, serving to the chain construct model affinity and enhance visitor loyalty. Video games are additionally a stimulus to encourage followers to enroll in Royal Perks, which is accessible on-line and by way of a cell app.
The outcomes are promising: Gamification is driving engagement for company taking part in these efforts, in line with Preston Nix, director of loyalty and buyer relationship administration at Burger King.
“They begin to come extra incessantly they usually begin to spend extra, driving that stickiness of our model,” Nix stated. “We’re in a hyper aggressive business and we’ve seen [gamification] drive up that constructive sentiment in the direction of the model.”
A powerful connection
For Burger King, the aim of its gamification technique is to create an emotional connection by going past rewards and presents to supply a contact level for loyalty members who need to interact with the Royal Perks app.
“We now have to provide you with different methods to get [customers] to interact with our model,” stated Nix. “That’s what these campaigns are: we would like folks to come back into the shops and the app extra incessantly. The perfect gamification drives engagement of our lively base and brings in new company to the model as a complete.”
Broadly talking, it may be useful to the underside line when manufacturers put a better give attention to constructing long-term buyer relationships and aren’t so reliant on the short-term earnings pushed by promotions.
“We live in an financial system that’s reliant on relationships — frequent and lively engagement,” stated Arlene Spiegel, founder and president of Arlene Spiegel & Associates, a restaurant consulting agency in New York. “Most diners expertise the model on their telephones — greeting by identify, ordering, paying, rewarding, thanking. Video games are an attractive method to personal the highest-valued actual property in as we speak’s digital world: embedding your model’s app on a smartphone.”
Making it higher
As Burger King launches extra video games, it continues to refine its gamification technique. One essential lesson the corporate has internalized is that the video games should be genuine and lean into the model’s core messages, akin to that its burgers are flame grilled.
“For those who go into it in an genuine method, customers will obtain it in an genuine method,” Nix stated.
One other key lesson is the significance of creating video games as seamless as doable for the visitor and as straightforward as doable for them to take part, really feel rewarded and valued. Pleasure was excessive for Cloud Float, Nix stated, attributing the sport’s success to the number of rewards and presents that have been supplied and graphics that confirmed off the Frozen Cotton Sweet beverage.
The chain doesn’t have a calendar it sticks to for introducing new video games and as a substitute tries to launch them round key alternatives, like when it’s launching a limited-time provide or there’s a connecting second, like Burger King’s seventieth birthday.
The video games are all distinctive and Burger King prioritizes reviewing the efficiency of every, the place persons are participating with the model, the place they’re dropping off and the way the expertise might be improved. And the video games won’t ever repeat, even when they’re extremely well-liked, per Nix.
“You need issues to really feel recent and new,” he stated.
Nostalgia meets modernization
Not surprisingly, video games attraction largely to youthful audiences like Gen Z and millennials. Nonetheless, Burger King additionally tries attraction to broad segments via video games.
“We’re a big model and we need to cater to everybody as a complete,” Nix stated.
To achieve older customers, Burger King leans closely on nostalgia, together with in Balloon Burst, which is a twist on a traditional carnival sport and consists of Stout King, a preferred determine from early Burger King days.
“It’s traditional nostalgia-meets-modernization, which is what the Burger King model is all about,” Nix stated.
Having a gamification technique within the “hyper-competitive” burger business is desk stakes, he continued.
“These days everybody has a rewards program and presents and the winners of this house are those who can lean into taking it one step additional. We wish the visitor to come back in and drive visitors however we additionally need them to come back in and have interaction with the model in a method they need.”
