Another very interesting example of instrumental conditioning is gamification. And this is really a new frontier. This is a very, very rapidly growing strategy. Basically, the strategy of gamification turns routine actions into experiences, as it adds gaming elements to tasks that might otherwise be boring or routine. So just what is gamification? A simple definition is this the application of gaming elements to non game contexts.

And you've probably encountered a lot of these. In recent years, it's getting very popular to receive all kinds of badges, for example, as the result of doing certain activities. So we are starting to hear this term gamification, quite a bit. I actually even teach an entire course on it at my university. A lot of people misunderstand just what gamification is. Many people think it involves playing a game, such as playing Candy Crush at your desk.

I know that you would never do that. But there are people who do believe it or not. So is that an example of gamification? No, it isn't sorry to say, because that really is just playing the game for the fun of playing the game. A gamification strategy incorporates a number of important elements. One is that it includes multiple short and long term goals in order to keep people engaged.

Typically, the players receive rapid and frequent feedback on how they're doing, especially relative to other people who are involved in the same situation. We usually find that there's some kind of reward for most or all of their efforts, often in the form of a badge or some kind of virtual product. So we're typically looking at some kind of friendly competition that occurs in a low risk environment. In other words, you may lose the game, but you won't lose your shirt. And there's a manageable degree of uncertainty to keep things interesting, but not too frustrating. Here's a wonderful example of gamification at work.

And this was a very nice campaign that was sponsored by Volkswagen in Europe. What you see here is an attempt to gamify something that most people really don't want to do, and that is getting more exercise by taking the stairs instead of taking the lazy way out and taking an escalator. So Volkswagen created what it called the piano staircase. And this is a regular staircase, except that when you step on each of the steps, a different note is played just like playing a piano and so people are able to run up and down the stairs and actually play music. What Volkswagen is doing here is taking a mundane activity that many people want to avoid, and injecting an element of fun into it to promote healthy behavior. incredibly successful campaign I should point out a video that you should look at, I encourage you to Google this, or to find it on YouTube has been watched over 17 million times.

And more importantly, two thirds of the people who came upon this situation, wound up taking the stairs instead of taking the escalator. gamification strategies often include a leaderboard. The leaderboard lists the participants who are involved in the situation, and not only provides them with feedback about how they're doing keeps things competitive by showing them how they're doing relative to the other people who are involved in the situation as well. We often see badges as I mentioned earlier. And these badges can reward people for virtually any kind of activity, whether it's mastering some kind of task at work to doing something just for fun. As I noted earlier, gamification is really taking off in marketing campaigns.

So look around you, and you'll start to see a lot of this being implemented, you really should think about this for your own business. There are a lot of different ways to do it. But essentially, what you're doing is taking boring activities and making them fun. So there are of course many marketing situations where your consumers aren't nearly as engaged as they should be. And you might want to think about this as a strategy to ramp up their level of engagement.