Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska Sectio H, Oeconomia (Jun 2023)

Gamification in Market Research – How to Encourage People to Write More

  • Michał Ścibor-Rylski,
  • Michał Mijal

DOI
https://doi.org/10.17951/h.2023.57.2.175-189
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 57, no. 2
pp. 175 – 189

Abstract

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Theoretical background: Gamification has been applied in business practice since its origins. Though one of the fields scarcely investigated so far is how gamification can be used to improve results obtained in the quantitative market research. The rationale behind this application is the phenomenon resulting in receiving rather brief and short responses to open questions in online surveys. Encouraging people to give more elaborated answers is a serious challenge of the modern online quantitative market research. Purpose of the article: The authors decided to check how to increase participants’ engagement and effectiveness of the market research by applying gamified tasks. The gamification was used in two approaches: storytelling and points collection with leaderboards. Research methods: The research was conducted in an experimental scheme with one control and two experimental groups with gamified tasks. Total number of participants that took part in the experiment was N = 89. Participants’ task was to watch a TV commercial and fill out a form with the first reaction and evaluation of various aspects of the advertisement. All questions were open-ended and the number of used words was used as the indicator of the respondents’ engagement. Main findings: Application of points and leaderboards resulted in significantly more developed answers in comparison to traditional open questions and also storytelling tasks. On the other hand, narrative task – contrary to many previous research – does not seem to have impact on the answers’ length. The results show that gamification oriented towards achievements and competition in the market research increase the performance and also can be a long-term motivational tool. These initial results are very promising, but further research is needed to verify the effect on bigger sample of the regular market research respondents.

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