Friendefi Hosting Complimentary Ai Networking Evening in Toronto

Friendefi is excited to host tomorrow evening’s complimentary Ai (Airline Information) networking evening in Toronto. Themed ‘Loyalty & Engagement in the Age of Millennials’, the event aims to provide an enjoyable opportunity for loyalty practitioners to network, learn about “gamifying” loyalty, and to hear from our panel of experts on the subjects of gamification and engagement in the age of millennials.

To view the evening’s agenda and to register, click here.

Plus to boost the fun, Friendefi is offering 1 iPad mini 2 Wi-Fi (16GB) with Retina display to one lucky registered attendee. To increase your chances of winning, take a few minutes to play our gamification trivia challenge!

Friendefi A Winner At Hyperliens

Yesterday, the Friendefi team went up against other startups, gamification companies, and digital solution providers at Hyperliens, a Montreal-based initiative where Quebec-based startups compete for the opportunity to address the challenges of four major Quebec corporations with their solutions.

Friendefi presented to Sobeys Quebec, whose IGA stores are looking for a mobile-enabled solution to collect feedback from customers when they shop. We pitched Sobeys on using our Audience Engagement Platform to create a fun and rewarding mobile survey application that would allow customers to earn             AIR MILES® Reward Miles for providing feedback.

And we’re thrilled to announce that Friendefi was selected by Sobeys as their winner!

Read more about Hyperliens in today’s article in Les Affaires.

Five Reasons Why Loyalty Needs Gamification

This week, The Wise Marketer included a segment from The Loyalty Guide 6 in its weekly newsletter that nicely sums-up why loyalty programs need gamification.  With gamification increasingly on the minds of marketers looking to boost customer engagement and loyalty, we think it’s an insightful and timely piece.

Here are the five reasons cited:

1) Lack of adequate personal information on the member. To take an example, most loyalty programmes have meagre information like First Name/Last name and some level of address details. A few industries like airlines, telcos, hotels, e-tailers that manage substantial customer information including mobile numbers/email IDs etc. Organizations via gamification are offering points and other rewards to loyalty members to encourage them to give more information about themselves.

2) Customer attention and engagement is another factor that has profound implications on the efficacy of a loyalty programme. Gamifying the member portal also means introduction of polls and contests to the loyalty member. While the member gets points/other rewards for participating in these activities, the company gets vital & real information from the members.

3) Social media: ubiquity of social media has ensured that most members would be part of the most popular ones. The possibility of earning rewards can encourage members to ‘like’, ‘recommend’ specific promotions to their ‘friends’ thereby supporting viral-marketing of certain promotions.

4) Segmentation/fragmentation: More information about loyalty members would enable the organization to slice and dice members and create more deployable segments or better fragments. This will enable better targeting of members with more-apt promotions. Needless to say, member response would be better and promotion ROI would be higher.

5) Advocacy: Better engagement with members helps in converting them to brand advocates. The power of WOM (word of mouth) is well known.

For more information, go to thewisemarketer.com 

Are you up for the challenge? Friendefi launches with American Airlines AAdvantage®

Montreal, Quebec, March 21, 2014 – Friendefi Inc. announced today the launch of its first customer engagement initiative with American Airlines, Inc. using its social gamification platform.  The American Airlines AAdvantage® Passport Challenge is a promotional application where members can earn bonus miles for playing educational games, social sharing, and completing specific flight activities, including beating a personal goal, from March 21 to May 23, 2014.

“The AAdvantage Passport Challenge is an innovative and engaging way for our members to learn about all the great opportunities to earn AAdvantage miles as well as the benefits of our recent merger with US Airways”, said Scott Hinshaw, Director Partner Marketing at American Airlines.  “Friendefi worked with us to develop a promotional game using their platform that is completely customized to our objectives, program, and partner branding”, Hinshaw added.

“We’re extremely pleased to add American Airlines and American Airlines AAdvantage to our growing roster of clients,” said Aaron Carr, Friendefi CEO and Founder.  “American Airlines is a world-renowned brand in the travel industry and American Airlines AAdvantage is one of the largest frequent flyer programs globally.”

Through a variety of social media and gamification features, Friendefi’s platform allows loyalty programs to offer fun and engaging promotions where their members can invite, share, or even compare their program activities with their social network friends.  These activities may include playing fun and educational program ‘games’ to purchasing products and services (from program-affiliated merchants and service providers).  Similarly, programs can offer promotions where their members can compete or collaborate in their pursuit of earning rewards.  All initiatives are built for both a desktop and mobile-optimized experience.

 

About Friendefi

Friendefi Inc. is a private company that owns and operates a proprietary social gamification platform aimed at helping loyalty programs create fun, social, and interactive promotions that increase membership engagement and profitability.

For more information about Friendefi, please visit www.friendefi.com

To play the challenge, go to aadvantagechallenge.aa.com

Know Your Travel? Aeroplan uses Friendefi’s platform to engage and educate its members

Last week Aeroplan launched its Know Your Travel contest, featuring a challenging trivia game about its hotel, car rental, packaged vacation, and cruise-ship partners.  The game is exclusively available to members and allows them to play as many times as they’d like to get the highest score – 1,500 game points – and to earn all 78 possible entries into the contest.  Members can earn bonus entries for sharing on Facebook and Twitter.

Friendefi is thrilled to have worked closely with Aeroplan and it’s creative agency, Cossette Communications, in providing this fun and unique experience to members.

If you’re an Aeroplan member, you can play the game here: Know Your Travel

Using Gamification to Build Alliances Between Brands and Consumers

Friendefi’s Aaron Carr recently spoke to Commerce Lab about using gamification to strengthen the relationship between brands and consumers.

Read the full article here: Friendefi Uses Gamification to Build Alliances Between Brands and Consumers

The Social Side of Gamification

Game-play by nature is highly social (perhaps with the odd exception – Solitaire anyone?)  And in today’s hyper-connected world, its no surprise that gamification is often as well.

In fact, game-play often attracts people with socially-oriented motivations.  After all, what fun is winning, achieving a new high-score, or earning badges if you can’t share those accomplishments with others?  Sharing triumphs isn’t the only social-motivator inherent in games, however.  Many massively multi-player games include extensive ‘quests’, exploration, and collaboration – all of which may involve social behaviour.

The practice of gamification has embraced these social dynamics quite heavily.  Earning badges has become synonymous with many ‘gamified’ experiences.  Badges are social by nature.  And why shouldn’t they be?  With over 1 billion of us connected through Facebook and other social networks, it makes sense that we proudly display our achievements as a way of sharing our life experiences and interests with our friends.

And while social behaviour may be a happy byproduct of gamified experiences, it increasingly works the other way around.  Many marketers find that social-sharing can be an effective way of promoting their brands.  So, why not reward this behaviour to promote greater brand engagement through social networks?  Simple game mechanics such as contests where participants earn bonus entries for friend referrals can be incredibly effective.  Similarly, game mechanics can be used for longer-term engagement and social-sharing initiatives.  Marketers are beginning to experiment with online and mobile promotions where participants are rewarded not only for sharing, but for brand interactions – watching videos, playing trivia, and voting to name a few.  What these initiatives all have in common is that they’re plugged into social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  This allows marketers to create seamless experiences for participants where they can easily interact with the brand and then share that experience and related achievement with friends.

Loyalty programs also have an interesting role to play in brand engagement through social channels.  If you enjoy earning virtual rewards for your accomplishments, chances are you’ll enjoy earning real rewards, such as points or miles, even more – especially if you’re already a member of the program.  In fact, combining virtual rewards, like badges, with loyalty program points may prove an even more powerful motivator to get people interacting with and sharing your brand through social networks.

And the game mechanics don’t have to stop there  – many other tools, like leaderboards, can be used to promote social-sharing .  The big rewards will go to those marketers who continue to embrace these new tools and the opportunities they offer to engage consumers.

Interview: Friendefi speaks to Corporate Knights Magazine

Friendefi’s CEO and Founder, Aaron Carr, talks to Corporate Knights Magazine about rewards, gamification, and encouraging environmentally sustainable behaviour.

For more, read the full article.

Gamifying Christmas?

At Friendefi, we’re pretty busy building-out our new interactive gamification platform.  But when we got a call from the big man in the North Pole – that’s right, Saint Nick himself – who were we to turn down a last-minute gig?

It turns out that Santa (he’s a pretty informal guy) had already successfully implemented various gamified applications within his production and customer service operations.  We won’t name names, but he’s using some pretty big enterprise applications with gamification functionality – he is, after all, running a serious manufacturing, logistics, and customer service operation.  So, we wondered how we could help.

Santa cut right to the chase (he’s also no nonsense when it comes to business).  He told us that his Business Intelligence team had uncovered some pretty discouraging trends amongst children over the past decade.  While the majority of children are still “nice” and not “naughty”, a growing segment appeared unengaged with Christmas and generally apathetic towards good behaviour.  Moreover, his BI team indicated that the current trends could become a real problem in the next few years if not addressed now.

So he told us, “I need you to help me gamify Christmas and get children all over the world more excited about being good!”

Our collective “holy cow” reaction was nearly audible, but our Team Lead replied enthusiastically the next moment: “No problem, Santa, we’re engagement experts and have just the gamification solution for you!”

And so, we set off on our task to gamify Christmas.  How did we do it?  Well, if over the next year you hear your kids talking about earning “Nice Points” and “leveling-up” to compare their good behaviour achievements with other kids in Santa’s social network, you’ll know.  And, don’t be alarmed if your children are late for dinner because they’re busy competing in a challenge with their friends to out-do one another with good behavior.  But mostly, if you notice a distinct improvement in your kid’s behaviour – it could little things like preparing the table before dinner (10 Nice Points) or cleaning their rooms (25 Nice Points) or even telephoning their grandparents to hear how they’re doing (50 Nice Points) – then you’ll know…

In the meantime, the team at Friendefi wishes everyone a very happy holiday season and offers you our best wishes for a tremendous 2013!

Gamification of Loyalty? Much Ado About Gamification – Part 5

Previously, we defined gamification and reviewed examples across a range of sectors – from fitness to scientific research.  Now let’s get to the heart of the matter and talk about potential applications for the loyalty industry.

But first, let’s get a couple of obvious points out of the way.  In evolutionary terms, it could be said that gamification is of the same ‘genus’ as loyalty programs.  They’re distant cousins of one another and when applied to consumer marketing both largely serve to drive brand engagement, repeat purchasing, increased basket-size, and – well – loyalty.  So, it’s no surprise that gamification providers refer to their “behaviour platforms” and loyalty providers claim that their programs “profitability change consumer behaviour”

Okay, with these obvious similarities on the table, let’s look at where gamification parted ways with loyalty programs along the course of their evolution.

Anyone who has ever been a frequent flyer, a frequent hotel guest, or a frequent shopper (at grocery stores, pharmacies, coffee shops, etc.) will know the basic elements of a loyalty program:

• Program members earn points on their purchases;
• Points accrued can be redeemed for discounts or other rewards;
• High-value members can achieve ‘status’ with additional benefits;
• The program sends offers targeted to members based on their past purchases, demographic characteristics, and behavior within the program.

While we can’t offer objective data, we would estimate that the vast majority of loyalty programs – both big and small – don’t go substantially beyond these dimensions.  The sophistication of their practices is more measured by the strength of their analytics capabilities and their resulting ability to customize the program experience and offers to the individual.  And at Friendefi, we fully subscribe to this practice – offer relevance through targeted marketing is powerful.  But despite this, loyalty promotions all too often lack the full engagement power of well-designed gamified systems.

Why is this?

Well, to start, think back to the various mechanics we’ve reviewed to date: progression loops, feedback, competition, cooperation, comparison, achievement, recognition…to name a few.  This is not to say that these mechanics are wholly absent from loyalty programs.  In fact, many are present to a certain degree.  For example, earning points puts a value on each transaction allowing members to keep ‘score’.  And members can progress to elite tier levels with more exclusive benefits and recognition.  But these elements are not at all optimized within the program to ‘turbo charge’ the consumer experience and to maximize engagement.

Mark Goldstein, the former CEO and founder of Loyalty Lab (now a division of TIBCO Software), recently wrote in his Top 10 Coolest Things Going On In Loyalty that “Game mechanics are today’s rocket fuel of loyalty programs.”  He went on to say that game mechanics have gone beyond strictly social applications and are now being used to increase customer revenue and lifetime value.

So, you may ask: If loyalty programs have many of the essential ingredients of a gamified system and strive to achieve similar, if not the same, consumer engagement objectives, then why haven’t they incorporated game mechanics to produce a new, thoroughly kick-ass marketing model?

About one year ago we asked ourselves the same question.  And roughly 6 months later, Friendefi was born.  We fully believe that the global loyalty industry would benefit from the turbo-charging power of properly deployed gamification.  And, we’ve developed a platform to help programs do just that.

Stay tuned – in our next commentary, we’ll elaborate with descriptive examples.