Paula: Hello and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals.
Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and also now Loyalty TV.
Paula: Today’s episode is hosted by Amanda Cromhout, the founder of Truth, an international loyalty consultancy, and the author of the book, Blind Loyalty 101 Loyalty Concepts Radically Simplified.
Paula: If you work in loyalty marketing, you can watch our latest video interviews every Thursday on www.loyalty.tv.
Paula: And of course, you can also listen to Let’s Talk Loyalty every Tuesday, every Wednesday and every Thursday to learn the latest ideas from loyalty experts around the world.
Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda Cromhout from Truth, and today I have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Jacqui Nortje from Discovery Vitality and Glenn Gillis from Sea Monster.
Amanda: Both are deep experts in gamification.
Amanda: Our discussion talks about how we use game design elements in a non-game context to drive sustainable behavioral change.
Amanda: I discovered that the fastest growing segment of gaming users every single day are 50 plus men.
Amanda: Dr.
Amanda: Jacqui Nortje talks us through how Vitality Active Rewards shows sustained and ongoing behavioral change, which has been live since September 2015.
Amanda: It is based upon goal streaks, which are important in driving long term behavioral change.
Amanda: And Glenn talks through one of his clients, TFG Rewards, had they achieved an 81% sign up rate, with 20 to 30 minutes of time played on the game and a 95% voucher redemption rate.
Amanda: These figures are simply staggering.
Amanda: I asked the question in my book Blind Loyalty, is gamification child’s play or a serious strategy?
Amanda: After listening to this podcast, there is no doubt, this is a serious loyalty strategy.
Amanda: What an absolute pleasure to be able to talk about an industry that’s actually bigger than the film and music industry combined.
Amanda: And with over 3.2 billion active gamers, today’s conversation about gamification needs to be heard.
Amanda: It needs to be heard across the loyalty industry and across the entire marketing industry, if not further.
Amanda: So absolute pleasure today to introduce two heroes in this environment.
Amanda: I’m really excited to chat to Dr.
Amanda: Jacqui Nortje and Glenn Gillis.
Amanda: And we’ll do introductions in a moment, but to have both of you on this podcast is a real treat.
Amanda: So welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Glenn: Thanks, Amanda.
Dr. Jaqui: Thanks for having us, Amanda.
Amanda: So I think before I unravel why you’re such experts in the gamification field, let’s kick off with what you know is the absolute favorite question.
Amanda: And it’s a question that Paula always starts with, but what is your favorite loyalty program?
Amanda: Jacqui, let’s start with you.
Dr. Jaqui: Thanks, Amanda.
Dr. Jaqui: So there are so many great loyalty programs out there.
Dr. Jaqui: And I think even locally, there’s so many that have become a part of my day-to-day life.
Dr. Jaqui: I think the one that is most relevant for our family is the Dyschem loyalty program, but more specifically, the baby bag benefits.
Dr. Jaqui: So in this benefit, shortly after you feel pregnant, you register.
Dr. Jaqui: And after a certain amount of spend, you can get a fully stocked baby bag.
Dr. Jaqui: For us as first-time parents, it’s an intimidating journey to start off on.
Dr. Jaqui: So having such a nicely stocked, well-made, lovely bag, took us some of the admin out of the hospital journey.
Dr. Jaqui: And even now, my daughter’s too, and we still use the bag when we go out and about on adventures.
Dr. Jaqui: And it’s actually quite lovely when she sees other families with the same bag, she’s like, look, mommy, that’s one like ours.
Dr. Jaqui: So it does create that sense of community, and it’s very relevant for our family.
Amanda: Oh, beautiful.
Amanda: Very cool.
Amanda: The relevance straight back to yourself at this particular life stage is a lovely example.
Amanda: Thanks, Jacqui.
Amanda: And Glenn?
Glenn: Yeah, like Jacqui says, I think there’s so many amazing schemes out there and we are blessed.
Glenn: So one element of a scheme that I really admire is something that we built for Alt Mutual, which is Africa’s largest insurance company.
Glenn: And a lot of people talk about making better customers or actually market making initiatives.
Glenn: And it’s hard to do in the financial services space.
Glenn: Let’s be honest, it can be kind of boring and kind of dense.
Glenn: But people do want to know, they do want to know what to do with their money and all these questions they’ve always been afraid to ask.
Glenn: So ManiVersity is a suite of digital solutions that we built for them.
Glenn: It’s got animated content, it’s got little tools, mini games, a couple of elements in it.
Glenn: And it’s proper learn to earn.
Glenn: So as you watch and engage with this content, you’re actually earning reward points.
Glenn: And so of course, there’s a proper financial liability.
Glenn: This thing needs to be completely balanced.
Glenn: But we’ve been running this over for over eight years now with the insurance company and it’s still an integral part of the offering.
Glenn: There are of course, many other ways that you can earn rewards.
Glenn: But I just love that idea that we’re getting people to voluntarily be engaged with the content.
Glenn: And so you’ve got to work hard.
Glenn: These are not just your typical explainer videos.
Glenn: These are going to be pretty good story-driven things to engage people.
Glenn: And actually we’re dealing with wicked issues in the insurance industry, like persistency, and so by making better customers, you get better results.
Glenn: And I guess Jacqui’s organization is an example of another lens of, yeah, sometimes doing the right thing for the customer is actually good for you too.
Glenn: So yeah, mine’s probably Maniversity, the element of Old Mutual Rewards.
Amanda: And we’ve featured Old Mutual twice on Let’s Talk Loyalty, so they’re not, that’s not a strange brand for the audience to understand.
Amanda: And I feature that particular aspect of the Old Mutual program in Blind Loyalty, so I’m a huge fan as well, Glenn, so lovely.
Amanda: Okay, so the piece that I’m actually most looking forward to starting off this conversation as a background to your careers, because Jacqui, I’m actually going to, I’m going to ask you to talk through how you got to where you are now.
Amanda: So please tell us how you got to where you are now in your career.
Dr. Jaqui: It’s a bit of a funny story, because when I started out, I started as a proper numbers person.
Dr. Jaqui: As I said, Applied Maths, I thought I was going to go into stats.
Dr. Jaqui: Actuarial Science was one of my backups.
Dr. Jaqui: But when I finished my masters in 2012 in Applied Maths, instead of pursuing an academic career, I decided to enter the workforce.
Dr. Jaqui: And I was very lucky to end up at Discovery.
Dr. Jaqui: And the reason I say that is, while I started in the Health Insurance team in one of the Actuarial teams, because there are so many different divisions and it’s such a broad company, I got the opportunity to move into the Vitality Research and Development team in 2015.
Dr. Jaqui: And that’s really where my exposure to the world of behavioral economics and gamification started.
Dr. Jaqui: Before that, it was just a buzzword that I’d heard every now and then, and I’d read some of the books, but I didn’t see the mechanics until I started in the R&D team.
Dr. Jaqui: And one of my first big projects was Vitality Active Rewards, which I’ll talk about a bit later because it is a big gamification platform.
Dr. Jaqui: But that introduced me to the field of gamification and I just fell in love.
Dr. Jaqui: I can see the value that it brings to our clients’ lives and just in general.
Dr. Jaqui: Behavior changes hard.
Dr. Jaqui: Sometimes things like managing your finances or being physically active, it’s difficult and it’s a bit boring sometimes.
Dr. Jaqui: Where gamification and behavioral science helps to make these difficult things easier.
Dr. Jaqui: I loved it so much that I decided to re-enter the academic sphere in 2019 to do my PhD in gamification.
Dr. Jaqui: It was a no-brainer for me because of my work in active rewards.
Dr. Jaqui: But I targeted it very much from the goal setting angle.
Dr. Jaqui: So, how can you frame goals more effectively?
Dr. Jaqui: And how can you adjust the goal to meet a person where they are and make it more relevant for them?
Dr. Jaqui: And also looking at the long-term effectiveness of gamification and what are some of the ways that you can keep it fresh and relevant for members.
Dr. Jaqui: I finished at the start of this year, and I graduated in December, so it is still a very fresh journey.
Amanda: Congratulations.
Amanda: Out of interest, do you know of anyone else who has a PhD in gamification anywhere in the world?
Dr. Jaqui: I think there are big experts, or some of the people that are referenced.
Dr. Jaqui: For example, a professor in Canada called Leonard Naka, but he’s more on the industrial organization side of things.
Dr. Jaqui: And then there’s Yuka Chu, who I think has been on the podcast as well.
Dr. Jaqui: I’m not sure if he has a PhD, but he’s absolutely one of the founding voices in gamification.
Dr. Jaqui: But Chad, it is a bit of a new, I guess, way I bring that behavioral science lens to gamification, which is quite a novel angle.
Amanda: Thank you for sharing that.
Amanda: And then for Glenn, I don’t want Glenn to feel intimidated here because I hold Glenn up with the highest esteem with gamification.
Amanda: He is the contributor for Chapter 64 in Blind Loyalty, which is child’s play or serious strategy around gamification.
Amanda: So Glenn, I’ve respected your prowess in this area for a very, very long time.
Amanda: So please tell us where you are now.
Glenn: Yeah.
Glenn: So my day job is as the CEO and the co-founder of a company called Sea Monster and we make Impact Games.
Glenn: And what that means is that we’re delivering a business outcome, a learning goal, social change.
Glenn: So as you mentioned in your introduction, the gaming industry is absolutely massive.
Glenn: There are a lot of misconceptions about what makes a gamer.
Glenn: But what we know to be true is that mammals learn through play and structured play in a business context is a serious instrument for change.
Glenn: And so it’s wonderful to see the science and art really coming together and really starting to deliver business results.
Glenn: So absolutely, over the last 13 years, we’ve survived building 120 games and gamified solutions.
Glenn: I say survive because these processes are emergent and the science is still busy being developed.
Glenn: But we’ve worked with a lot of the big banks and insurance companies, a lot of the retailers.
Glenn: And for me, one of the things that makes a game, or one of the definitions of a game is a goal, rules and feedback.
Glenn: So then we’ll agree that that’s pretty much what loyalty is, trying to figure out the combination of things.
Glenn: But then it adds this other magic ingredient, which is voluntary engagement or fun or whatever you want to call it.
Glenn: But there are a couple of different ways you can look at that.
Glenn: But ultimately, what it means is that you need to be human-centered in your design approach.
Glenn: And for me, that speaks to us as humans, us as marketers, putting the customer, really putting the customer back at the center of that experience.
Glenn: So we’ve been delighted to work with young kids building games, put them in roadblocks.
Glenn: We’ve also taught credit committees how to start thinking about ESG scorecards, along with their financial scorecard.
Glenn: And we’re using the power of structured games to do exactly that.
Amanda: It’s absolutely fascinating.
Amanda: I love it.
Amanda: I think we’re going to be here for a lot longer than the podcast allows us to be.
Amanda: So thank you for sharing as well, Glenn, your background, but Sea Monster’s focus.
Amanda: Jacqui, I don’t believe anyone listening to this podcast won’t know who Discovery or Vitality, what the Discovery and Vitality brands are.
Amanda: But let’s not make that assumption.
Amanda: So if you don’t mind, can you give us a little background to the Discovery brand?
Amanda: I know it certainly isn’t restricted to the South African market.
Amanda: It’s a global brand and Vitality.
Amanda: And then we’ll talk later about Vitality Active Rewards.
Dr. Jaqui: Perfect.
Dr. Jaqui: So as you mentioned, Discovery is South African founded.
Dr. Jaqui: We were founded in 1992.
Dr. Jaqui: And we are predominantly a financial services organization, but we operate across the full stable of where people need solutions.
Dr. Jaqui: So we are in the healthcare space, life insurance, short-term insurance, long-term savings, more recently in the banking space and wellness.
Dr. Jaqui: So wellness is Vitality, which is where I predominantly focus.
Dr. Jaqui: But what makes our proposition so unique is the shared value model, and that is underpinned by Vitality, and Glenn alluded to it earlier.
Dr. Jaqui: But we can see across health, finance and driving, there are typically only a handful of behaviors that are responsible for the worst conditions that drive the worst claims.
Dr. Jaqui: So for example, in the health care space, we have four lifestyle behaviors.
Dr. Jaqui: So physical inactivity, poor nutrition, smoking and alcohol consumption, which drives four of the big non-communicable diseases, which then is responsible for 60 percent of deaths.
Dr. Jaqui: And this concept carries through globally.
Dr. Jaqui: It’s not unique to this.
Dr. Jaqui: So the numbers might change a little bit, depending on which market you’re looking at.
Dr. Jaqui: But at its essence, if there are a few key behaviors that you can address, you can make a massive difference to your clients and to society.
Dr. Jaqui: So that’s our shared value model is the vitality solutions.
Dr. Jaqui: So across health, drive and money, we create interventions that help to address these behaviors, which leads to positive behavior change, which reduces risk.
Dr. Jaqui: And that risk reduction, more importantly, creates actuarial surplus, which we can then plow back into the program to create even more behavior change.
Dr. Jaqui: So we’ve exported that shared value model widely.
Dr. Jaqui: At the moment, we’re operating in 41 markets, and we’ve got over 42 million lives internationally that Discovery covers.
Dr. Jaqui: So in South Africa, we have Discovery Health Life Insure Invest in Bank.
Dr. Jaqui: In the UK, we have Vitality Health and Vitality Life.
Dr. Jaqui: But then globally, in what we call the partner markets, we typically create strategic partnerships with existing insurers in the space.
Dr. Jaqui: Two of our key partnerships are Ping An Health and Amplify.
Dr. Jaqui: Some of our others include John Hancock, Generali and AIA.
Dr. Jaqui: So in the partner markets, we’ll bring our Vitality product to partner with them and help drive that behavior change.
Dr. Jaqui: As I mentioned, I specifically work in the SA composites.
Amanda: Yeah, it’s a very, very impressive organization.
Amanda: Every time I speak to either yourself or Celeste, that’s just globally incredibly impactful.
Amanda: So Glenn, you shared with us just now your idea, some of the terminology around gamification, around goals, rules, feedback, the voluntary engagement, which obviously is something I’m incredibly passionate about in terms of the importance of member engagement in a successful loyalty ecosystem with the customer at the center.
Amanda: So from a definition point of view of gamification, would you add anything else to that?
Glenn: No, I think that’s definitely our preferred working definition.
Glenn: I mean, I guess technically the definition is just using things that we know work in the games industry and applying them in a non-game context.
Glenn: But I think that human-centered design is the word that just resonates with all of us, particularly as loyalty practitioners, you know, because we do tend to know who our customers are and we are thinking about, okay, what’s in it for them and why should they keep coming back?
Glenn: I may just mention that, you know, the biggest challenge for us is to move beyond rewards into loyalty.
Glenn: There’s a lot of efforts around extrinsics and getting better and better at giving personalized offers back to customers.
Glenn: Sometimes I like to say, yeah, better ways to give away margin.
Glenn: But ultimately, it’s those intransects that the brand equity, the sense of belonging, the sense of creativity, the sense of I’m connected to your brand purpose.
Glenn: And so for me, at its highest level, that’s something that you want to really borrow from the gaming space, because games are not driven purely by extrinsics.
Glenn: They are in fact industrialized ways to scale intransects.
Glenn: And that’s often got to do with story, it’s got to do with narrative, it’s got to do a whole bunch of things, which we know work at a psychological level.
Glenn: We have the data to be able to track that.
Glenn: But on the other end of the spectrum, it’s also the playful design elements that we’re starting to see everywhere.
Glenn: And if you think about providing a lot of visual information and feedback, and again for the schemes that have tiers and levels and points, they’ve often got to try and explain that.
Glenn: But if you think about it in a game, it explains that very well, very intuitively and visually.
Glenn: Not in an, it doesn’t need to be overt about it, but every, all the players know that what it is.
Glenn: So there’s the playful design element, I think which is beginning to affect all of our worlds.
Glenn: And then we’re starting to borrow particular mechanics.
Glenn: You know, now, the one we always laugh about is the win and spin mechanic.
Glenn: You know, everyone seems to think that’s a good place to start.
Glenn: But there are lots of things that we know work in games, cool down periods, things like that, which will give people a reason to come and a reason to come back.
Glenn: But in, for us, it’s about using the dark art of that game design principles for good.
Glenn: And to try and, you know, not, not like a shared value.
Glenn: So Jacqui said it best.
Glenn: So yes, there’s really this continuum of light elements of gamification, some mechanics of gamification.
Glenn: But that would be, we would be missing an opportunity if we didn’t think about actually the things that make games the world’s favorite media.
Glenn: And that is this idea of like, I’m part of something bigger than myself.
Glenn: I have agency in my own story.
Glenn: And I think that that’s such a great way of empowering our customers.
Amanda: I love that.
Amanda: What did you say?
Amanda: The dark art of…
Amanda: The dark art of games.
Amanda: To drive good.
Amanda: That’s amazing.
Glenn: Yeah.
Glenn: Yeah.
Glenn: Because habit formation can be crushed.
Glenn: I mean, they’re very good at it.
Amanda: And Jacqui, from your point of view, obviously you’ve got both academic and business practical application of this.
Amanda: So I’m interested in your definition of gamification.
Dr. Jaqui: So I can definitely echo everything that Glenn said.
Dr. Jaqui: I think gamification is one word that describes such a massive, it’s a design strategy, it’s a framework, it’s so much more powerful than what the word alludes to.
Dr. Jaqui: So I do typically follow the academic definition of using game elements and game design principles, but in a non-game context.
Dr. Jaqui: So quite often from our perspective, we’ll use some of the design principles and the way of approaching game design, but the end result is very seldom a fun game.
Dr. Jaqui: So while something like Active Rewards is very engaging and it’s gamey, it’s not, you can’t compare it to like a Pokemon Go, which while is a game and encourages physical activity, the end result wasn’t necessarily to have fun or be a game.
Dr. Jaqui: It’s more that game elements to drive sustainable behavior change.
Dr. Jaqui: And I love when Glenn mentioned habits and habit formation, because that is often something that we see in the health care space, is with something like physical activity, you don’t get fit and then you’re done.
Dr. Jaqui: It’s a continuous, daily, front of mind behavior and activity that you have to keep engaging with.
Dr. Jaqui: So I definitely, what I appreciate from a gamification perspective, and I come at it from a behavioral science angle and lens.
Dr. Jaqui: So I look at what the underlying psychological needs are that are being addressed.
Dr. Jaqui: So I often like to combine a gamification framework, so like octalysis or the MDA framework, and then pair it with a behavioral framework.
Dr. Jaqui: So something like Combi or I’m all motivational, like the proper theory frameworks, like self-determination theory.
Dr. Jaqui: Because I think the academic theories give you a very good starting point on what you need to address, what you need to do, and how you need to think, but gamification gives you the tools.
Dr. Jaqui: It knows if you are looking for a person who is very motivated by competition, and they’ll love a good, they want to be able to brag about it, you know that you bring in a leaderboard.
Dr. Jaqui: But if you’re working with someone who’s a little bit more intrinsically motivated or someone who’s looking for that altruistic elements, you need to push harder on charitable giving and gifting.
Dr. Jaqui: But it is, and Glenn, I so love that you mentioned intrinsic versus extrinsic, because it is so easy to slap a reward on something and call it a day.
Dr. Jaqui: But that’s not how you encourage sustained and sustainable behavior change.
Amanda: I think it’s really special actually having the two of you on here because we’ve got this real obviously academic lens, but ability to apply it in the business.
Amanda: And then Glenn, you have such breadth to your experience because of the 120 plus brands, I think, that you’re servicing.
Amanda: So this is a really special, special discussion.
Amanda: However, I think it from my own experience of talking in the loyalty environment and talking with loyalty leaders around the world, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about gamification.
Amanda: So could you quickly maybe just share with us, Glenn, some of those misconceptions that you come across about gamification?
Glenn: Yeah, I think we’ve got to start with the misconceptions around who are gamers.
Glenn: And it’s, as you said in the intro, bigger than the film and music industry.
Glenn: The fastest growing segment of gamers currently in the world is actually 50-year-old men.
Glenn: And over 25 percent of them are gaming every single day.
Glenn: Perhaps that’s the Werdl generation.
Glenn: And one of the segments that spends more money on games than any other is the 35-
Glenn: to 55-year-old woman segment, that perhaps the Candy Crush sort of crowd.
Glenn: So the first misconception is, actually everybody, it turns out, is a gamer.
Glenn: It isn’t just two teenagers sitting in their underpants playing Fortnite.
Glenn: Apologies for that visual image.
Glenn: But so yes, the facts are important.
Glenn: And so that’s the first part.
Glenn: And that’s just gaming in a pure entertainment sense.
Glenn: And brands are now struggling to figure out how to show up in that space.
Glenn: And particularly the top of funnel guys, the agencies and so on, now realize that they’ve got to go and advertise in these games.
Glenn: And they say, but hang on, it’s my space.
Glenn: You can’t start shouting at me.
Glenn: It’s very different to any other form of marketing.
Glenn: Most other forms of marketing basically are interrupting something that you would rather be doing.
Glenn: And when you pay a subscription, it’s usually to get rid of the ads.
Glenn: Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
Glenn: So that goes back to this idea of voluntary engagement.
Glenn: But what we’re particularly interested in is, that’s a $250 billion a year industry, and it’s got its own dynamics.
Glenn: But for us, it’s really about applying this into the large organizational contexts, both in Africa, around the world.
Glenn: It’s just such an obvious, structured, data-driven way to really deal with some of the biggest strategic challenges that companies are having.
Glenn: I’ll come at this from a slightly different perspective.
Glenn: And so I’m the chairman of something called Games for Change Africa.
Glenn: So they’re based in New York, they’re 21 years old and they’ve been bringing together academics and others to really research impact gaming.
Glenn: They’ve also got a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations around the Sustainable Development Goals.
Glenn: And so if you think about it, we’re all in the business of behavior change.
Glenn: It just depends where we are in that.
Glenn: And if you think about how are we going to get a billion people to change their habits around the imminent climate crisis that we’re going to experience in our lifetime, now you start to see the power of gaming.
Glenn: Because here I can put you on a euros journey, I can give you agency in that story, I can share all this knowledge which people have around climate change and preparedness.
Glenn: And I can do that in a game or a game like way at massive scale, and I can get the data coming back.
Glenn: So I’ve got that beautiful dance going on where, you know, I put out a hypothesis, I can test it and, you know, the delicate dance continues.
Glenn: How else were you going to do that?
Glenn: And so, you know, we have this media, we have these tools, and we have these pressing social problems, but also these huge business opportunities.
Glenn: So yeah, game expensive, except compared to all of its alternatives.
Amanda: I love that, I’ll remember that in the budget plan.
Amanda: So I think Jacqui, from your point of view, you’ve got deep, deep experience in one of certainly South Africa’s fondest loyalty brands.
Amanda: So can you talk us through the behavioral science model with Vitality Active Rewards?
Dr. Jaqui: Absolutely.
Dr. Jaqui: So Vitality Active Rewards, as I mentioned, was one of my first big projects.
Dr. Jaqui: So it is very close to my heart.
Dr. Jaqui: So I’m glad to hear that South Africans look at it so fondly.
Dr. Jaqui: So Vitality Active Rewards is our big gamification platform.
Dr. Jaqui: And it’s been absolutely instrumental for us in creating sustained and ongoing behavior change in the program.
Dr. Jaqui: So in the SA business, the current iteration of the game represents all three of our pillars.
Dr. Jaqui: So health, drive and money.
Dr. Jaqui: And there are similarities where appropriate across the three, but where there need to be differences, we’ve embraced that the behaviors aren’t exactly the same.
Dr. Jaqui: So some features apply more to physical activity than money and so on and so forth.
Dr. Jaqui: My focus is specifically on the health pillar.
Dr. Jaqui: So that’s where I’ll focus today.
Dr. Jaqui: And the health pillar predominantly is there to encourage people to become more physically active.
Dr. Jaqui: So we currently have over 700,000 users on the Vitality Active Rewards platform.
Dr. Jaqui: And it’s been live since September 2015, which is from an ongoing game perspective.
Dr. Jaqui: We are still getting new users.
Dr. Jaqui: Our old users are still engaging.
Dr. Jaqui: They’re still playing the game.
Dr. Jaqui: We have people who have never missed a goal from day one.
Dr. Jaqui: So it’s not that people come on and drop off.
Dr. Jaqui: They keep playing the game and they have been playing the game for close to 10 years.
Dr. Jaqui: At its very essence, the game or the gamification framework is very simple.
Dr. Jaqui: And I think that is part of the beauty of it, is you can engage with the simplest parts of it and change your behavior appropriately.
Dr. Jaqui: But if you are a super user, there is even more to the platform.
Dr. Jaqui: So we try to hit everyone, all types of users and players.
Dr. Jaqui: And as I mentioned, it’s quite straightforward.
Dr. Jaqui: Each week, a person has an exercise goal.
Dr. Jaqui: And this exercise goal is personalized based on your historic activity and historic goal achievements.
Dr. Jaqui: So if you’ve been really diligent in hitting all your goals, you’ll go all the up.
Dr. Jaqui: If you have been less diligent, it’ll either stay the same or go down.
Dr. Jaqui: And that personalization element is so important.
Dr. Jaqui: And that’s something that we keep on making sure that we’ve hit it.
Dr. Jaqui: The goal is framed in terms of vitality points, which is our broader framework.
Dr. Jaqui: And different activities are worth a different number of points.
Dr. Jaqui: So something like walking 5,000 to 10,000 steps a day is only worth 50 points.
Dr. Jaqui: Whereas doing a 5-kilometer run is worth 300 points.
Dr. Jaqui: And the reason that this is important is the allocations are commensurate with both the duration and the intensity of the activity, but it’s also commensurate with how valuable it is to reduce your risk.
Dr. Jaqui: So we know that heart rate workouts and things that are there to improve your cardio respiratory fitness is a lot more important, or it’s very valuable in improving your risk.
Dr. Jaqui: So those types of activities are worth more in the game.
Dr. Jaqui: But because the goal is a flat point structure, it is up to you as the player to decide how to strategize your week and how to earn your points and achieve your goal.
Dr. Jaqui: Then if you have achieved your goal, you are rewarded.
Dr. Jaqui: When the game went live in 2015, the reward mechanism was very simple.
Dr. Jaqui: You had a choice between a coffee, a smoothie, a popcorn or charity reward.
Dr. Jaqui: The coffee has just, it is just too funny.
Dr. Jaqui: We have one of the coffee partners in our building, and it is my absolute favorite every week when I achieve my goal to go downstairs and get my Vita coffee.
Dr. Jaqui: But the reward mechanism and the framework has evolved over time.
Dr. Jaqui: So the goal setting and the core of the goal, the game has stayed the same, and we’ve done a lot to personalize the reward space.
Dr. Jaqui: In 2018, we introduced a game board, which really kickstarted the gamification angle of the game.
Dr. Jaqui: And there, a person, when you achieve your goal, you can uncover a tile, and this tile is a certain number of discovery miles.
Dr. Jaqui: And these miles can then be redeemed.
Dr. Jaqui: You can redeem them for vouchers or an out broader miles framework.
Dr. Jaqui: And that’s also where the bank element comes to quite strongly.
Dr. Jaqui: You have a lot more miles burn opportunities.
Dr. Jaqui: And then in 2023, the most recent version of the game or expansion of the game, we just upped the gamification features and upped the personalization features.
Dr. Jaqui: So now, your engagement each week directly influences what your game board looks like through feature tiles.
Dr. Jaqui: So for example, if I earn 300 fitness points, then my feature tile is 300 points.
Dr. Jaqui: But if I have a really good week and I earn like 1,200 points, if you’re super, super, super exercise user, you get that 1,200 mile tile on your board.
Dr. Jaqui: So your engagement in the behaviors directly influences the value that you can uncover in the board.
Dr. Jaqui: Some of the other features that we introduced was miles multipliers to reward goal streaks.
Dr. Jaqui: Because we know that goal streaks are really important for driving that long-term behavior change.
Dr. Jaqui: But we also know that starting your goal streak is quite difficult.
Dr. Jaqui: So at key milestones, so at 5, 10, 15, we double the miles that you earned.
Dr. Jaqui: And then once you hit that 15-week streak, it’s very likely that the habit has become entrenched and we can start focusing more on the intrinsic rewards.
Dr. Jaqui: And then the gap to getting the double miles increases.
Dr. Jaqui: But at 25 goals, you start earning rest weeks, which is super valuable for our members.
Dr. Jaqui: At 100 goals, you get a Centurion shirt.
Dr. Jaqui: So as the year streak gets longer and longer, we start playing more on those intrinsic and like the, what’s the right word?
Dr. Jaqui: But where people want to, they’re proud of the achievement and they want to show it off.
Dr. Jaqui: So we’ve really, the game and how we’ve approached the game is to address different people at different levels of engagements and also experience in the game.
Dr. Jaqui: So telling a completely new user about rest weeks and Centurion shirts and miles multipliers and blah, blah, blah, that gets very complicated.
Dr. Jaqui: So at the beginning, it’s just focus on achieve this week and you’ll get a reward.
Dr. Jaqui: Okay, we’ve made one week, let’s get to two weeks.
Dr. Jaqui: And we build it.
Dr. Jaqui: And as you become more used to the game and more used to the framework and the platform and the behavior, something like earning a sneak peek, the members who really play for those features have made it a part of their, and maybe to take a deviation.
Dr. Jaqui: A lot of these features have grown from how we’ve seen people play the game.
Dr. Jaqui: So something like Goal Streaks when we initially went live wasn’t a game feature.
Dr. Jaqui: We showed it to members as an interesting fact.
Dr. Jaqui: But because our members have valued it so much and they’ve created it as a currency, we realized that we had to formalize it as part of our platform.
Dr. Jaqui: Similarly, with something like a sneak peek where you have to double your goal, that means that a person A knows what their goal means.
Dr. Jaqui: They know how to achieve the double points, and it’s valuable enough for them that they want that sneak peek.
Dr. Jaqui: So it is something that our experienced members really love.
Dr. Jaqui: And I think it is something like Active Rewards takes a lot of gamification principles.
Dr. Jaqui: So unpredictability from the game board, avoidance through goal streaks, empowerment in how you choose to play the game, but we also layer on the behavioral principles around, we know that micro-incensors are really effective at driving behavior change.
Dr. Jaqui: So I think it’s a beautiful combination of gamification and more traditional behavioral science.
Amanda: Thank you, Nour.
Amanda: I think anyone who knows me knows how I’m very attracted to this anyway.
Amanda: So it’s incredible.
Amanda: But it’s incredible listening to it from your background and the theoretical.
Amanda: I mean, I experience it every week, every day, actually.
Amanda: So I always laugh about, you know, how do you get average human beings to look at an app about insurance, right?
Amanda: Like, I think that was your point at the start, Glenn.
Amanda: And I think you’ve just epitomized the absolute process.
Amanda: It’s incredible.
Amanda: So congratulations to everyone at Discovery and Vitality.
Amanda: I think it’s just incredible.
Amanda: So I think, Glenn, let’s switch tacks a little bit.
Amanda: We’ve had two insurance examples.
Amanda: Have you got another case study that we could highlight around, you know, your favorite case study in terms of gamification success?
Glenn: Yeah, I think it’s firstly an important question because, you know, listening to Jacqui and the Vitality, it’s like, it’s complicated to make something simple, and they have done exactly that, and that’s emergent behavior.
Glenn: But of course, a bank has got this benefit that they’ve got, and an insurance company has got all these data points around you, and so they can validate a lot of this.
Glenn: And so it might sound to a lot of people listening in that, how am I ever going to start?
Glenn: You know, this sounds like a big systemic kind of change, and yes, it might be, but it doesn’t have to be.
Glenn: So one of the biggest clothing retailers on the continent, TFG, the Foshini Group, has got 34 brands, 4,700 odd stores, and over 37 million members active on their rewards program.
Glenn: I mean, it’s just an extraordinary number, and so they can attribute a very big proportion of that business to humans.
Glenn: And, you know, like any forward-thinking, globally competitive retailer, they’ve got a really good reward system.
Glenn: They’ve also got a two-year backlog of features, and they also want to try and figure out how do they solve for the engagement piece?
Glenn: Because, you know, some of their brands are occasional, you know, how many times in your life do you buy a sofa?
Glenn: Versus some of them, and almost none of the brands are high-frequency shopping destinations.
Glenn: So like you say, like Discovery has proved, you can find a compelling reason to get involved in them.
Glenn: And so we designed with them just a wrapper, an engagement wrapper that sits on top of their rewards engine.
Glenn: And the typical call to action, as you know, would be SMS, get 10 percent off, whatever, okay?
Glenn: Or email, whatever it might be.
Glenn: So what we did is we made it harder for the customer.
Glenn: And this is so counterintuitive, but the science around this is just complete.
Glenn: So this platform that we’ve got, which is white labeled, allows us to grab people from wherever they are, in-store, online, SMS.
Glenn: Eighty-one percent of people signed up for the first call to action.
Glenn: So they’re giving us a piece of data about them, and they engaged with us for almost seven minutes in that first session.
Glenn: And we’re not selling anything at this point.
Glenn: We’re just telling people about it.
Glenn: Do you know this?
Glenn: Check this out.
Glenn: We haven’t made them an offer at this point.
Glenn: There’s no reward.
Glenn: This is just purely engaging with them.
Glenn: We’ve got 3.3 sessions per user.
Glenn: So now think about the total cost of acquisition has come crashing down.
Glenn: So I might have got you for a second on Instagram or via an SMS.
Glenn: I’m giving you almost 20, 30 minutes of time with the bread.
Glenn: But now that comes with a big responsibility.
Glenn: Because don’t shout at me.
Glenn: Don’t just try and flog me whatever it might be.
Glenn: You have to do it in a way that’s valuing me.
Glenn: But they’ve got a homewares business.
Glenn: They’ve got tons of content about design tips and all sorts of things that they can surface back to their customers, do that in a relevant contextual way.
Glenn: And people will come back again and again.
Glenn: But here’s the most ridiculous thing.
Glenn: On the first campaign we ran, it’s crazy.
Glenn: We had a 95% voucher redemption rate.
Glenn: And these were for small denominations.
Glenn: So we’re talking here $5, $10 incremental rewards.
Glenn: You could almost have had that same reward, SMS get the $10 off that way.
Glenn: But by putting these things in and as customers, they engage, they’re not lucky.
Glenn: So spin and win, it’s your luckiest customer.
Glenn: What you want to do is reward your most engaged customer.
Glenn: And so these people have now invested 20, 30 minutes of their time, including physical store check-ins, like we can get them to literally validate that we found them on the internet with that.
Glenn: We got them to the front door of the store.
Glenn: And over 95% of them are redeeming these vouchers because they’ve made the effort.
Glenn: And so they felt that they’d earned it.
Glenn: And it’s such an obvious subtle thing, but it works so incredibly well.
Glenn: And this could be bolt on, bolt off.
Glenn: Needless to say, after the first few months, we’re like, where do we sign?
Glenn: We’ve got 20 other goals to give you to figure out how we’re going to address them.
Glenn: But I think it’s going to be a massive shift as the loyalty capability moves further up the value chain, up the marketing funnel.
Glenn: We are going to get more of that marketing budget.
Glenn: The guys at the top of the funnel cannot attribute sales.
Glenn: I would argue they’re often not building brand equity.
Glenn: And that money went to price and performance marketing.
Glenn: And I think it’s going to end up coming to the loyalty people.
Glenn: Our budgets are going to get bigger because we actually have the science behind the behavior change.
Glenn: And we can build brand equity because then that’s loyalty beyond rewards.
Amanda: I think you can hear the audience of Let’s Talk Loyalty celebrating there, Glenn.
Glenn: I’m right.
Glenn: I might be wrong.
Amanda: It lends myself to, we actually could carry on chatting all day.
Amanda: I know that we’re running out of time.
Amanda: So I’m actually going to come to our last question.
Amanda: And what you just said lends itself beautifully to the last question.
Amanda: So actually commercially, you’ve given us some pretty solid statistics there around the Faschini Group campaign, and you spoke earlier, and Jacqui as well, on active rewards.
Amanda: How commercially does one measure gamification?
Amanda: Jacqui, let’s start with you, please.
Dr. Jaqui: So I think there are a few lenses that you have to look through when measuring the value of a gamification platform or design.
Dr. Jaqui: So I typically consider it from four main angles, but I think it is important to adjust the measures based on your specific context.
Dr. Jaqui: So the first theme I look at is the immediate impact of the gamification platform, directly related to the behavior change and engagement that you wanted to address.
Dr. Jaqui: So you need to assess the output of the game against what your initial objective was for introducing the game.
Dr. Jaqui: So in the Vitality Active Rewards context, our primary objective is to increase physical activity.
Dr. Jaqui: But from a broader vitality context, the objective is obviously to make people healthier, to reduce their risk, and therefore to reduce claims.
Dr. Jaqui: So we can look at it from the physical activity angle.
Dr. Jaqui: Did we increase physical activity?
Dr. Jaqui: We can look at from the risk perspective, which is often tied to the claims perspective.
Dr. Jaqui: So have we reduced claims for those members who have engaged?
Dr. Jaqui: In the active rewards context, because we have the data and because it’s a platform that was introduced into an existing program, we can directly compare people’s engagement prior to the game, to their engagement on the game.
Dr. Jaqui: But we can also look at the population who’s not engaged in vitality active rewards and compare them to the population who is engaged.
Dr. Jaqui: So from that perspective, from a vitality perspective, we know that those who are engaged in the game have a 46 percent higher physical activity days per month compared to those who are unengaged.
Dr. Jaqui: And in the health space, we know that even increasing your activity levels by one day a week has reduced health claims or has a significant reduction on health claims.
Dr. Jaqui: So that’s a very straightforward lens of how to measure the value.
Dr. Jaqui: But the second theme is also looking at the data that your game generates and assessing what the value of that data is.
Dr. Jaqui: So I very recently came across an article where the authors proposed using gamification as an accurate way of assessing a person’s underlying personality characteristics.
Dr. Jaqui: From a practical perspective, you can use this type of output to segment your user base, draw deeper insights, personalize your product offering even further.
Dr. Jaqui: And that’s just one example of how you’ve taken data generated to push back into your program.
Dr. Jaqui: From our perspective, the Vitality perspective, one of the things that we’ve seen is the Active Rewards game has encouraged people to track their physical activity much more consistently.
Dr. Jaqui: So prior to 2015, before we introduced Active Rewards, you still had an annual goal of getting active.
Dr. Jaqui: You reached, you want to reach a specific status.
Dr. Jaqui: You still want to end points.
Dr. Jaqui: But once you hit diamond status, once you reach the points threshold, there wasn’t really a specific reason for you to continue tracking until the next year.
Dr. Jaqui: But when we introduced Active Rewards, we shortened that goal period from being active in a year, to being active weekly.
Dr. Jaqui: And that goal persists from calendar year to calendar year.
Dr. Jaqui: So we went from a situation where people, where there wasn’t really much concern if a person forgot to wear their Apple watch to go running.
Dr. Jaqui: Whereas now, if you don’t wear your watch, I can guarantee you people will do a second run wearing the watch just to make sure that they get their points and achieve their goal.
Dr. Jaqui: So that continuous tracking has given us so much more data that we can use to draw valuable conclusions from our members and to get a better picture of member engagement.
Dr. Jaqui: And to give you an idea of sort of the quantum of interactions that is possible, when we looked at the ActiveRoads ecosystem in 2022, just before the last iteration went live, we saw that the platform generated over 50 million interactions in that year.
Dr. Jaqui: So it’s 50 million data points that we wouldn’t necessarily have had prior to the game.
Dr. Jaqui: So I think it is, so there’s obviously the direct impact of the game, but it’s also the data that you generate.
Dr. Jaqui: And the third theme that I would consider is how your gamification platform can impact the broader program.
Dr. Jaqui: So something like Active Rewards targets a very specific behavior, targets physical activity.
Dr. Jaqui: But in the broader vitality ecosystem, we also want people to eat well, we want them to do preventative screening, we want to do activities that promote good mental well-being.
Dr. Jaqui: Well-being is so much more than just being physically active.
Dr. Jaqui: And one of the things that I’ve read about in The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg is, there are certain behaviors that act as a keystone behavior, where if you can get a person to engage in that one behavior, it typically has knock-on effects.
Dr. Jaqui: So something like physical activity, we know that if a person starts engaging in physical activity, it is very likely that they will also start eating well.
Dr. Jaqui: It is also very likely that they will start engaging in other health-promoting activities.
Dr. Jaqui: So by targeting a keystone behavior, which in this case was physical activity, you have the knock-on effects and you hit so much more of your targets.
Dr. Jaqui: So in a program, if you can identify that one behavior and focus a lot of your gamification efforts and budgets into that behavior, it’s very likely that you will also reach other strategic objectives.
Dr. Jaqui: Then the last one that I would consider is the players themselves.
Dr. Jaqui: I think Glenn alluded to this earlier as well, but people who engage in the platform are far more likely to see value.
Dr. Jaqui: And by seeing more value, they become better clients.
Dr. Jaqui: They have greater persistency.
Dr. Jaqui: They are more likely to be brand ambassadors.
Dr. Jaqui: You are creating good clients, and you are potentially attracting good clients.
Dr. Jaqui: So from that perspective, having a really appealing game structure is quite valuable in unlocking value for your clients, but also for yourself.
Amanda: Goodness gracious, we could keep chatting, I think, for hours on this.
Amanda: So I think a lot of people listening to this show will want to reach out and make contact with you both.
Amanda: So I’ll put your LinkedIn profiles in the show notes.
Amanda: And yeah, I just want to say on behalf of everyone around the world of Let’s Talk Loyalty, the fact that we all happen to be based in South Africa is absolutely relevant here.
Amanda: This is a global story, a global movement in not only the loyalty industry, but obviously we’re focused in the loyalty industry.
Amanda: So from myself personally, Glenn and Jacqui, what a really, really truly insightful discussion.
Amanda: So thank you for sharing all of that with the Let’s Talk Loyalty audience.
Paula: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty. If you’d like us to send you the latest shows each week, simply sign up for the Let’s Talk Loyalty newsletter on letstalkloyalty.com. And we’ll send our best episodes straight to your inbox. And don’t forget that you can follow Let’s Talk Loyalty on any of your favorite podcast platforms. And of course, we’d love for you to share your feedback and reviews. Thanks again for supporting the show.
