Playing to Win: How Gamification Can Boost Customer Engagement and Turn Non-Fans into Brand Advocates

Abstract: In today’s progressive technology development, it is imperative to engage the customer and transform them to become brand advocates. Firms need to ensure their brand’s longevity in this competitive market, at times putting noncustomers in hindsight. This thesis aims to explore how firms can utilise Gamification to engage noncustomers and make them advocate for a brand. To explore this phenomenon, this thesis takes the concepts Gamification, Customer Engagement, Online Brand Advocacy as its starting point and puts special emphasis on the Metaverse as it is an emerging digital engagement platform. Using a quasi-experimental research design with four-manipulation Gamification aspects, we discovered four key findings; (1) the Behavioural dimension of Customer Engagement is a key driver in Online Brand Advocacy compared to the other dimensions. In addition, it is the Behavioural dimension of Customer Engagement that gets noncustomers to advocate for a brand, while the Emotional and Cognitive dimension develops during the post-experience phase, (2) out of the three Gamification aspects, the Motivational Affordance motivated noncustomers the most to engage and advocate for the hypothetical brand, (3) Gamification aspects has a direct effect on noncustomers advocating behaviour without an established consumers-brand relationship, and (4) noncustomers are extrinsically motivated to engage with a brand based on behavioural factors. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, from a theoretical standpoint, it offers a conceptual model and empirically assesses the impact of Gamification utilising various gamified aspects. Second, from a pragmatic and practitioner perspective, the findings aid marketers in developing sustainable marketing strategies, and harness the power of Customer Engagement and Advocacy with the use of Gamification. Hence, this thesis yields new insights to the emerging research on Gamification, Customer Engagement, and Online Brand Advocacy. Therewith, this study offers a novel approach, by linking these three concepts, and introducing Customer Engagement and Online Brand Advocacy as an outcome of Gamification in a metaverse context.