Exploring the Impact of Gamification Elements in Brand Apps on the Purchase Intention of Consumers

1. Introduction

In the digitalized market in today’s era, innovative business strategies have become a necessity. One such innovative marketing strategy is integrating ‘Gamification’ for an increased engagement from the target customer (Behl et al. 2022). Gamification has been used in several areas like healthcare management (Hammedi et al. 2017; Silja et al. 2020), online education (Dicheva et al., 2015; Parra-González et al., 2020), engagement, and development towards the community (Hassan, 2017), disaster management (Behl and Dutta, 2020), human resource and knowledge management (Armstrong et al. 2016; Buil et al. 2020), marketing (Huotari and Hamari, 2017; Tobon et al. 2020; Xi and Hamari, 2020), etc. In a report by Forbes (2021), 70% of the Forbes 2000 companies have adopted gamification especially in mobile marketing (Park and Bae, 2014). Bloomberg (2019) has estimated that the global gaming market is likely to exceed $525 Billion by 2023. There is an increase in the number of organizations that are using gaming techniques and game-style rewards to increase customer engagement (Gartner, 2014). Gamification with mobile coupons is a marketing technique used by 40% of US brands. Thus, there is an increase in the interest in the studies of gamification among the researchers and practitioners, as it is considered to be an efficient marketing and promotional tool (Marchand and Hennig-Thurau, 2013; Terlutter and Capella, 2013; Al-Zyoud, 2020).