9783957960016-rethinking-gamification

McGill and a salesman in the Coen Brothers’ adaption of Homer’s Odyssey,
titled O Brother Where Art Thou? (Coen and Coen 2000).
Pomade Vendor: [. . .] here’s your pomade [. . .]
Ulysses Everett McGill: Hold on, I don’t want this pomade. I want Dapper
Dan.
P.V.: I don’t carry Dapper Dan, I carry Fop.
U.E.M.: Well, I don’t want Fop, goddamn it! I’m a Dapper Dan man!
The attitude that Ulysses Everett McGill shows towards his favourite brand
of pomade can be considered the epitome of brand loyalty – he connects
his very identity as a man and human being to the brand of pomade. Thus,
loyalty becomes a matter of the heart, a question of defining oneself via the
use of specific products. The loyal consumer of a branded product partakes
of its image.
Gamified Loyalty
Gamification processes, however, promise a far more direct way to getting
at the behaviour and therefore the loyalty of the consumer. Simple examples
are the frequent-flyer programs, described in Bunchball’s whitepaper (2010)
as a primal form of gamification.
The most successful of these is the Miles & More programme by
Lufthansa and other airlines of the so-called Star Alliance. 3 Here, aircraft
passengers can gather points through their flights, appropriately labelled as
miles. There exist two kinds of miles: “award miles”, which can be invested
in various upgrades and benefits, and “status miles” that can be collected in
order to climb up in a hierarchy of levels: 35,000 miles are rewarded with
the “frequent-flyer status” (level 1), represented by a silver card, giving access
to the business lounges as well as several smaller benefits. 100,000 miles
lead to a golden card, the so-called “senator status” (level 2), and access to
the senator lounges as well as an exclusive telephone service hotline for instance.
Finally, after collecting the unlikely amount of 600,000 miles in two
years, the passenger is allowed to call him or herself a member of the elected
3 More information under: http://www.miles-and-more.com (accessed May 8, 2014).
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