Amelia's Marvelous Marketing Blog

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

– Richard Branson

More and more often I am seeing companies using games as strategies to encourage user participation with their product or service. This fun element to a brand ultimately results in  sales and greatly increased awareness of a brands. I often think about something I heard in my first year of university, from a MBA guest lecturer in one of my classes. He said that, in our modern times of information overload and brand saturation, it was those brands that offered something free to their customers (or would-be customers) that gained competitive advantage. This ‘free’ could be anything- from a free song download every time you visited their website, to a free service like gmail. Its addition to the brand’s marketing strategy would help create loyalty, market share and, hopefully, long run competitive advantage.

I recently heard that Nike was employing such a strategy, where it was launching a free game called ‘The Grid’.

In the game, Nike has created a city-wide scavenger hunt using public telephone booths. It is an interactive game which aims at engaging urban residence in a sports quest- all in the name of fun (and also Nike).

The game will first be played in London, with the city divided into 48 zip codes. Each of these areas has four traditional phone boxes. Players in the game must run from one spot to another within the zone, using public telephones as their start and finish points. Players start by finding a telephone box, dialing a specific number, entering their unique identifier number, and then following the instructions they’re given, which will send them to other phone boxes in the city. The more routes they run, the more points they score.

Not only does this competition encourage urban residents to be active, it also creates a brand awareness that stems from a fun idea. People who hear about the competition will (hopefully) associate Nike with fun, being active and relevant to today’s culture. It will also link the brand with customer loyalty through the use of a ‘give-a-little-gain-a-lot” attitude. I think its a great idea.

I found my classmate, Michael Buchan’s blog post about Nike very interesting. In his post, Michael talks about the the interesting approach Nike has taken with its James versus Jordan commercial. The commercials tackle the dislike that Lebron James caused when he chose to sign with Miami Heat rather than the Cleavland Cavaliers, which he had played with for the last 11 years. Instead of ignoring the public’s negative reaction to this move, Nike came up with a complex advertising campaign to explain James’ motives. By doing this Nike has successfully created a situation where they don’t lose any business due to peoples personal opinions about Lebron James and therefore Nike continues to succeed. Like Michael, I think this is yet another example of Nike’s marketing brilliance.