Enhance your corporate identity through gamification
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What does your business put out to the world? I’m not asking what products you make, or what services you offer, I’m asking what’s the energy, the vibe, the key takeaways? How would someone describe your business if they were briefly explaining it to one of their friends?
Is your business youthful, dynamic, full of energy, and disruptive, or does your business play more classically with its corporate image, wearing a suit and tie and driving a Bentley?
Whatever industry your company operates in, whatever its aims, and whatever brand identity it wants to project through its corporate communications, gamification, either in your marketing, training, or other business aspects, implemented thoughtfully, is a sure-fire way to make people think “innovative” and “playful” when they’re looking for the best words to describe it.
Defining corporate identity
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before we talk about gamification, let’s talk more about exactly what corporate identity actually is. It’s quite commonly misunderstood, or only partly understood, as it can easily be taken on face-value to mean a number of things.
A company’s corporate identity is the way in which it presents itself to the public. On the one hand, there’s the logo, the font, the colours, the graphic design, and the visual elements like branding. In addition to the eye candy of a business’s imagery, there’s their advertising, their approach to public relations, their values, as well as the way they train their employees to communicate with their customers and partner brands. It even encompasses a business’s corporate culture, which despite being internal, will be reflected by employees. There should be guidelines with oversight of all these aspects and more in any corporate identity strategy. With that in mind, pretend your company is a magazine, and you can think of your tenets of corporate identity as being like an overarching house style.
What corporate identity do you want to present to the world?
So much of this is within your control as a business owner or a business leader. You can’t control everything regarding public opinion, and obviously, a lot of your identity is built off the reputation of the goods you produce or the services you provide, but by controlling the corporate communications content and materials you put out, you can make a significant difference to how your business performs and how it succeeds.
Success is a combination of what you provide to customers and how you’re perceived in a larger sense – is your corporate identity one that customers want to be associated with? For example, how do you interact with existing customers? Are you open to feedback, and do you seem to care about your customer, or are you a closed book when it comes to warranty claims and the Ts and Cs? Do you pay attention to aftercare, or are you perceived as a take the money and run kind of operation. This sort of thing, especially in this hyper-connected modernity, could dissuade new customers from buying into your brand, and dissuade existing customers from returning, quite possibly moving onto buying from one of your competitors whose branding and values look more attractive.
The corporate identity you present to clients
With that in mind, consider your customer facing content. Who is your target audience? What is your target customer? Are they looking for the bold innovator who flouts convention, or the trusted brand who they can set their watch by? Do they want the company that’s on the cutting edge of product design, and taking big swings in their branding to reflect this, or old fashioned values they know and trust? Control it in the content you put out. Tailor your style of copy and your tone of voice to that end.
A good example here would be the younger, more youthful looking craft beer breweries. Irreverent, off-the-wall copy, almost borrowing from the style of high-end fragrances, but making it edgier and cooler, and almost weaving a micro narrative to scream individuality. By contrast, some other breweries take advantage of how polarising such brands can be, and lean into being a classic beer, even poking fun at some of the so-called gimmicks those other breweries have embraced.
The experiences you create as part of your gamification strategy can be used in a couple of ways when it comes to your client-facing corporate communications. Not only is a modern gamified experience playable on any web-enabled device, but it’s an interactive piece of content that’s highly visual. You can customise game engines on the Drimify platform to use your graphics, your imagery, your copy, and tell your narrative in your words. You could customise something like a Survey to get an idea of what your customers and target audience think of your corporate identity, and you could even customise marketing games to enhance the user experience of doing business with you.
The corporate identity you offer to collaborators
Your corporate identity is just as important when it comes to collaborating or working with other businesses. When one company works with another, the brands of each business will reflect on one another. If your corporate identity doesn’t fit, that could be a reason another brand doesn’t want to work with you. If their corporate identity doesn’t mesh nicely with yours, that’s a reason you might choose not to work with them.
As part of your employer brand
The modern recruitment game is wildly recognisable from the early noughties, and almost qualifies as a different planet from the days of, “Just go knock on the front door and ask to speak to the CEO, that’s how you make an impression, kiddo.” One word: LinkedIn. Social media has basically taken over everything, and the job hunt is not immune. You need to look attractive as an employer to attract the most talented and sought after talent.
In many ways, your employer brand, which can be considered a part of your corporate identity, or at least adjacent to it, is one of the most important external faces of your business, and as such deserves its due diligence. Qualified, talented individuals who are willing to work hard, sometimes referred to as high performer-high commitment types, are the sorts of people who can take your business forward. If you’re not attracting the best people, and they’re instead choosing to start or continue their careers with your competitors, that’s a problem, not so obviously short-term, but in the long-term, when it comes to long-term growth and direction, you need a squad of winners.
By having playful, gamified content as part of your recruitment process, you can deliver an experience to applicants, and be fairer with their time, and more economical with your own. This is one of the most common uses of corporate gamification. For example, by utilising customised Quizzes in the hiring process to test them on job criteria, soft skills, and values, you can bring less applicants to the interview process, and ultimately shorten the hiring cycle for everyone involved. By continuing their onboarding with gamification, and offering your employees opportunities to upskill through exciting, rewarding, innovative experiences, you can improve retention, give your employees a better, more attractive environment, and improve your employer brand.
Your corporate identity is reflected by every employee anyone interacts with
Have you ever been to a shop, not been happy with the service, and then religiously shopped with competitors? Have you ever had a bad experience at a cafe and just written it off? And yet, they continue to trade, and they continue to have their own fans and advocates. This is for 2 reasons. Firstly, people are passionate, and can take umbrage very easily, and commit to a grudge, but also, human beings are human beings, and there is a lot of nuance in how we communicate, what each person thinks is reasonable and fair, and how they react (or over react) to things. You can’t control how Joe Public reacts, but it is your responsibility to train your employees to communicate inline with the business’s corporate identity.
When your employees speak to customers, they are speaking on behalf of your company. The language they use, their projected approach to the industry you’re in, must all reflect the company to protect and promote its corporate identity. You could easily customise a gamified experience to train teams how to speak on behalf of your company and be continuous and consistent with the corporate identity. You could take the Dynamic Path™ format, and create multiple steps or modules, using customised Quizzes and other media content to train them in best practices, proprietary terms and turns of phrase, and procedures.
Use gamification to craft an innovative, playful corporate identity
To recap, your business’s corporate identity is essentially its corporate image. It’s what your company puts out to the world. It’s how it chooses to represent itself. It’s PR, it’s marketing, it’s the logo, the branding, the font, the interactions, and through all that, the relationships it can build.
Every part of that must be adhered to in order to get the best results for your business. Think about the biggest brands in the world, what do they all have in common? A well-defined, strong, near bullet-proof corporate identity. Amazon, Google, McDonalds, Nike – you hear those names and you don’t just hear those brands, you see them. You know how they operate. They’re consistent.
A good corporate brand in today’s hyper-connected world, both in the workplace, and in public-facing media, can be massively aided by gamified experiences. Whether it’s to boost your employer brand through recruitment and onboarding, training your teams to speak in the company voice, or reaching customers and potential clients through marketing games, or something else, there will be numerous examples of applicable gamification success stories that can be replicated and adapted to your specific challenges. Modern gamification works on all modern devices, and invite people to really interact with your business. They invite people to participate in a branded experience, customised to your corporate identity.
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