Search results

This study aims to examine the impact of the gameful experience on behavioural outcomes. Drawing from stimulus–organism–response theory, it proposes and tests a new model that investigates the relationship between the gameful experience, brand loyalty and intention to use gamified branded applications in the sports context. In addition, it explores the mediating role of customer–brand engagement (CBE) and the moderating role of self-image congruity (SIC).

A sample of 436 active users of sport-related branded gamified applications was used to test the model. Data was collected from online sports forums, brands’ Facebook communities and during sporting events.

Results indicate that the gameful experience positively and directly impacts behavioural intentions but does not directly influence brand loyalty. This relationship becomes partially significant when mediated by CBE. In addition, results show that users with high levels of SIC are more likely to continue using the gamified application, whereas users with low levels are more likely to engage with the brand.

This study expands the gamification literature in the sports sector by revealing the importance of the gameful experience in driving loyalty, behavioural intentions and CBE. It proposes a new model that sheds light on the emotional aspect of the interaction between a user and a gamified system and the importance of exploring the effects of moderators, such as SIC, in these relationships.

Drawing from the Personal Construct Theory, this study aims to analyze the impact of using gamified apps on user behavior by investigating the service-related images and individual preferences of Generation Z (GenZ) consumers, as these emerge from gamified applications in a tourism context.

The repertory grid analysis (RGA) elicited the top elements that reflect GenZer perceptions in tourism from empirical studies in the UK and Greece. Generalized procrustes analysis was used to investigate the structure of the data for the creation of representative consensus biplots of the most important conceptual constructs to advance consumer decision-making modeling via gamification.

As per different gamified app best-practices considered, the authors extract not only common perceptual elements (e.g. place informative aspects, exploration, lodgings, food/catering) but also different image components (e.g. virtual/interactive, business vs commercial traveling, entertainment, heritage/cultural informative aspects) from comparing UK with Greek GenZers’ responses. These extracted attributes are then presented in two dimensional charts, respectively, toward creating tourist perception scales.

Notwithstanding the wide availability of gamified apps, research on gamification design in tourism and hospitality is still in the early phase. This study demonstrates the need to identify and optimize the formation of different images among GenZers. It also highlights the advantageous nature of the proposed combination of procrustes analysis with the RGA.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first empirical ones toward creating scales for measuring tourist perceptions of GenZers coming from different consumer markets. It responds to scholars’ recent calls for better informing gamification design and improving contemporary consumer experience.

This study aims to investigate the use of gamification and serious games as transformative technologies that encourage health and well-being behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the transformative value that can be created by gamified apps and serious games and the role involvement plays between transformative value and desired outcomes.

Four gamified apps/serious games were examined in the study, with data collected from N = 497 participants. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results revealed that gamified apps and serious games can create three transformative value dimensions – knowledge, distraction, and simulation – which can have direct and indirect effects on desired outcomes. Examination of competing models revealed involvement plays a mediating rather than a moderating role for gamification and serious games for well-being.

This research contributes greater understanding of how technology can be leveraged to deliver transformative gamification services. It demonstrates the multiple transformative value dimensions that can be created by gamified apps and serious games, which assist the performance of well-being behaviors and which have yet to be theorized or empirically examined. The study also establishes the mediating rather than the moderating role of involvement in gamification and serious games, as called for in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to research the role of stakeholder motivation in the context of gamification. The authors suggest, that a player’s motivation, is a key determinant of psychological engagement and subsequently, behavioral engagement. To examine stakeholder engagement through gamification, the authors propose a research model that links gamer types, i.e. a gamer’s motivation, with engagement and potential effects beyond the gamified content.

Online survey with 90 active users of a gamified application, followed by a multiple regression analysis.

The findings of the study suggest that a gamer’s typology, i.e. her underlying motivation, positively influences psychological stakeholder engagement toward gamified content and indirectly behavioral stakeholder engagement toward the communication instrument (i.e. the app) itself. The findings suggest that particularly gamified content that targets a person’s need toward achievement is a key driver of behavioral engagement toward an application. Thus, gamer types seem to be a good predictor for engagement on the part of stakeholders.

This research provides first empirical evidence about the effectiveness of gamification of mobile service apps and the critical role of stakeholder engagement. However, several limitations have to be noted: first, the study was conducted with only a single mobile app which targets only a specific audience and which only conveys specific types of gamified content. Second, given the small sample size and sampling approach the findings should be interpreted with care in respect to its reliability, validity and robustness. Third, as only a fraction of the variance of behavioral engagement was explained by the research, future studies should investigate additional variables that drive app usage (e.g. perceived informational value).

When talking about the role of dialogue in the process of establishing good and lasting relations between an organization and its stakeholders, the non-rational (e.g. emotions) forces of engagement are often disregarded. The human drive to play can be a powerful door opener in that process. The paper suggests that engaging in stakeholder relations through gamification might be as effective as the standard way of dialogue and two-way-symmetrical communication. Especially potential stakeholders who lack the interest and motivation for information seeking, can be attracted to the organization in such a manner.

Many studies that focus on engagement in the digital realm look to Twitter, Facebook, etc. in order to study company-stakeholder relationships. Thereby, the importance of many other digital media, especially games, is neglected. However, within gamified apps, small social networks form, which are driven by other forces (such as play), than in the aforementioned.

The present study contributes to research in the area of stakeholder engagement in the following way: even though engagement is widely believed to play a vital role in the process of building stakeholder relationships, research in the field of PR focuses mainly on the behavioral aspect of engagement. The results suggest to pay more attention to psychological antecedents in order to understand what drives engagement.

There is clear benefit in designing and sending notifications to users that persuade them to interact with an app and marketer goals. The purpose of this study is to examine how different motivational affordances in notifications affects subsequent app use.

The authors designed three studies to address the purpose: (1) an online experiment to test how individuals perceived notifications, which contained social affordances, progression-based affordances, and a combination of social and progression affordances; (2) a survey to gain a deeper understanding of why certain notification characteristics were effective and to unearth factors that jointly affected notification effectiveness; and (3) an in-app field experiment to test if the findings from studies 1 and 2 held up in a “real world” setting.

The analysis revealed that progression incentives yielded the greatest increases in user behavior. Neither a social incentive, nor a combination of social and progression affordances was more effective than one progression affordance. This effect was heightened by consumers’ involvement with the focal brand.

The contribution extends knowledge about the use of motivational affordances to gamify push notifications in high-involvement contexts. This implies that greater attention should be paid to how the: length of push notifications, affordances communicated and degree of consumers’ relationship with a focal brand (i.e. involvement) impact notification effectiveness. These findings set out new avenues to investigate the uses of gamification and services marketing in future research.

The authors provide marketers with insights into the most effective ways to gamify, structure and time the delivery of notifications. In high-involvement contexts where consumers decide whether to act on a gamified marketing affordance quickly, it pays to use push notifications that feature visible, immediate and tangible rewards. Understanding consumers’ involvement with the brand allows marketers to turn notifications from a potential annoyance into a viable conduit for engagement.

This research extends knowledge on gamification to the domain of push notifications. In doing so, the authors have demonstrated the communicated affordances and wording of the push notifications organizations send affect user behavior. The authors further expand knowledge of the role of consumer involvement on push notification effectiveness while controlling for app usage patterns.

This study argues that to drive users' continuance use behaviors, it is necessary to satisfy their desire for a meaningful experience when using information systems (IS). Therefore, this research explores the influencing mechanism by which gamified IS (immersive-related interaction, achievement-related interaction, and social-related interaction) impacts users' perceived benefits and continuance intention.

In this research, 367 users of Ant Forest are investigated in two waves through random sampling and the use of a structural equation model with SmartPLS 3.0 software.

The research results reveal the following: (1) both achievement-related interaction and social-related interaction can affect the user's continuance intention, while the direct impact of immersive-related interaction on the user's continuance intention is not supported; (2) users' perceived self-benefits fully mediate the relationships between achievement-related interaction and social-related interaction and users' continuance intention; and (3) perceived social benefits fully mediate the relationships between achievement-related interaction and social-related interaction and users' continuance intention.

This study supports the retention effects of gamification design on users' continuance intention by evocating users' dual perceived benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of several intrinsic motivations driving consumers' intention to buy using a mobile app, namely: shopping gamification, focussed attention, shopping enjoyment and socialness, through the mediating role of shopping engagement. The online shopping experience is investigated in its dual role as direct driver of the intention to buy using a mobile app and as moderator of the shopping engagement – intention to buy using a mobile app path.

The empirical analysis was performed in China due to the extensive usage of mobile shopping apps amongst the Chinese population. A structural equation model was estimated on 893 valid and complete structured questionnaires collected amongst a sample of Chinese consumers.

Findings confirm that intrinsic motivations (i.e. shopping gamification, focussed attention, shopping enjoyment and socialness) indirectly influence the intention to buy using a mobile app channelled by shopping engagement. Most remarkably, results show that the online shopping experience positively moderates the shopping engagement – intention to buy using a mobile app path.

The novelty of the paper lies in the conceptual and empirical evidence provided on shopping gamification, within the retailing marketing domain. The study investigates other related intrinsic motivations that jointly with shopping gamification directly influence shopping engagement and indirectly impact mobile shopping intention. The paper provides insights into the moderating role of online shopping experience, a key aspect when the challenge concerning gamification is considered.

Through a data-driven theory development approach, this study builds on affordance theory and demonstrates how online mobile app reviews can be analyzed to understand the drivers of informal mobile learning success.

Textual big data provide a wealth of information regarding user–app relationships and various facets of user engagement. Adopting structural topic modeling and sentiment analysis, the authors extract latent topics from reviews of two educational apps: Duolingo and Photomath.

The findings suggest that the quality of the relationship between users and mobile learning apps is significantly reliant on how underlying affordances have been actualized. While affordances can leverage satisfaction, they may also be a source of frustration in case of any failure in their design or integration. The analysis reveals eight emergent affordances: practicality, affordability, information reliability, instruction integrity, hedonic experience, user-friendliness, interactive input and iterative upgrading.

Since affordances of a technology entail both enablement and constraint and are best studied as a bundle of connected elements influencing each other reciprocally, the authors discuss how to address potential challenges from technical aspects to the added value of using mobile learning apps.

The results demonstrate that qualitative information in online reviews about mobile learning app experiences is of significant value. The approach demonstrates how advanced analytics can provide business value by addressing the evolving nature of customer needs and expectations. It proves the value of online reviews in discovering underlying technology affordances and their potential boundaries and challenges.

Today, marketing has evolved due to the emergence of new electronic technologies and has shifted to e-marketing. Meanwhile, the gamification and gamified systems is an up-to-date research topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. As one of the main goals of marketing is to increase customer engagement and loyalty by persuading and motivating them to participate, the gamification has a great potential for e-marketing. Although much research has been done on the gamification subject in e-marketing, there has not yet been a comprehensive review of these studies. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the scientific and practical research on gamification applied to e-marketing using the systematic mapping study methodology.

Because considerable research has been devoted to gamification since 2011, and the number of papers published in this area has grown steadily from 2011, the paper reviews the publications over the period 2011-2018. The research method includes developing research questions, designing the research process and filtering the findings based on the specified criteria.

The findings of this study show the main applications of gamification in e-marketing, the technologies used and the proven benefits of applying this technique in e-marketing. It also provides a classification of the studies in this area.

This paper helps other researchers to understand the main areas of research in gamification within the marketing discipline and enables them to find the fields needed for future studies.

The proposed classification can give a comprehensive overview of the scientific and practical actions taken on gamification applied to e-marketing for academics and practitioners. It also enables the readers to find main areas of research and motivates them to apply gamification in e-marketing.

The purpose of this study is to examine individuals' decisions to use health and fitness apps by applying the extended technology readiness and acceptance model (TRAM), which combines technology readiness (TR), the technology acceptance model (TAM) and perceived enjoyment (PEN). Moreover, this study explores the differences between users and non-users regarding their intentions to use health and fitness apps.

Data collection (n = 206) was conducted using convenience sampling from four large universities in South Korea. The data were analysed by partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 3.0.

The results revealed that positive TR positively affects perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived usefulness (PU) and PEN, while negative TR had a negative impact only on PEN. Furthermore, the significant relationships between PEOU, PU and PEN were identified. In addition, multigroup analyses indicated that the relationships between positive TR and PEN, between PEN and PEOU, between PEOU and PU, and between PU and behavioural intention were positively stronger for app users.

This study initially applied the TRAM to understand individuals' behavioural intentions to use health and fitness apps. Moreover, this study identified the distinct roles of positive and negative TR affecting individuals' cognition regarding using health and fitness apps. The differences in the psychological processes between app users and non-users offer insights and implications for practitioners.