“Aaand the Best Film of the Year 2023 award goes to…” — It’s that time of the year when you’ll probably hear your friends, family or any Tom, Dick, and Harry mention award shows.
Be it awards ceremonies for movies, TV shows, students or employees, recognising people with trophies, titles, medals, badges, and other achievement symbols isn’t a thing of the past.
Student of the Year, Employee of the Year, Best Actress, Foodie of the Year, Influencer of the Year — Such recognition tactics have been hanging around for years.
However, why is it done? It certainly feels good to receive recognition or find out who wins what, but is that it, or is there more to it?
We did some digging and found that visual forms of achievement like badges and trophies are rivers that flow into a sea named Loyalty. Let us tell you how.
Psychology of Badges
Psychologists say badges motivate someone intrinsically, as a reminder of their success, to boost their self-esteem and drive sustained behaviour.
Three factors drive such achievement psychology:
- Motivational factor: Receiving a badge, award, or trophy reminds one of their efforts that paid off, further boosting self-confidence. This pushes them to work harder towards the rewarding activity.
- Social factor: Those who receive badges see it as a status symbol. Badges also drive attention from peers, which fuels a feeling of satisfaction. Moreover, badges also come with a sense of community belonging.
- Success factor: Badges provide tangible proof of making an impact. It measures one’s hard work, such as receiving a class monitor badge for continued discipline and academic excellence.
Now, focus on words like sustained behaviour and continued effort from before. Say there’s an online grocery app that wants to ensure that people continue to buy using its app regularly.
For this, they decided to award the ‘Healthy Hunter’ badge to those who placed the most orders from the veggies category.
This is precisely how a badge helps reward customer loyalty, but a badge isn’t enough. Badges must also have a purpose that makes someone want to earn them repeatedly.
Hence, to build loyalty using badges, they must be integrated with a purpose using gamified rewards, which brings us to badge gamification.
Next, let’s understand badge gamification and how it has helped some companies boost customer loyalty.
What is Badge Gamification?
Badge gamification involves explicitly integrating gamified elements and rewards as badges to signify and celebrate learners’ accomplishments. These badges are digital tokens granted in recognition of achieving specific objectives or goals.
Digital Badges
While the traditional notion of a badge might evoke images of physical metal emblems denoting membership or support, digital badges operate in a virtual realm. They serve as incentives and rewards within digital landscapes, typically comprising:
- Trigger: The action performed by a user that unlocks the badge.
- Image: Visual representation portraying the badge.
- Description: Explanatory details elucidating how the user earned the badge.
- Reward: Sometimes, the badge also lets the user avail special perks
In gaming context, digital badges visually represent progress and accomplishments. Transcending the gaming sphere, these badges become powerful tools to enhance customer loyalty.
For instance, users may earn a badge for diverse online activities such as website visits, form submissions, or interactive engagements within their digital environment.
These badges are catalogued in a dedicated area like under ‘My Accomplishments’, allowing users to review and reflect upon their collection, thus fostering continued engagement and motivation.
As a result, users feel recognised for their loyalty towards a brand and continue to repeat such activities, hoping to unlock better accomplishments.
Badges and customer loyalty go hand-in-hand. Brands first challenge users to set goals for unlocking badges and then reward them for the dedication and loyalty shown.
Here are four companies that use gamified badges to reward customer loyalty.
4 Companies that Use Badge Gamification for Customer Loyalty
1. WeightWatchers Badges
WeightWatchers, renowned for its subscription-based weight loss and fitness program, exemplifies the efficient use of badge gamification within its loyalty program.
The program incentivises and rewards members for cultivating healthy habits such as food and activity tracking, weight monitoring, and active participation in WW meetings.
As members accomplish these challenges, they accumulate ‘wins’, which can be exchanged for rewards from partnering brands like Kohl or Headspace and experiential rewards.
Participants engage by enrolling in various challenges through the WeightWatchers app, like the ‘Weekend Warrior’ challenge, which focuses on tracking all weekend meals.
These challenges typically span a week, occasionally just a weekend, culminating in members receiving a badge on their profile alongside ‘wins’, the in-app currency they can later redeem for different rewards.
(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent WeightWatcher’s views
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)
WeightWatchers’ weight-loss program’s sophistication shines through its multifaceted approach.
It integrates various gamification features, including challenges, badges, milestones, tiers, and progress bars, to engage users effectively and stands at over 60k app downloads.
2. Stack Overflow Badges
As mentioned before, badges are an excellent way companies can give back to their users for their loyalty. Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for the Developer community, does this well.
The Q&A site harnesses badge gamification to honour, entice and reward user involvement for meaningfully engaging with the community via questions, answers, moderation, etc.
For example, a user gets a ‘Autobiographer’ badge on completing their profile. If they ask questions over five separate days, they get ‘Curious’ badge.
Additionally, a ‘Favorite Answer’ badge is awarded to a user if their answer is saved by five users.
Each badge also shows the number of times it was awarded, which motivates community members to contribute and continually enhance their learning experience.
(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Stack Overflow’s views
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)
Upon reaching measurable numeric goals via questions, answers, participation levels, moderation, specific tags, and more, users can also win Bronze, Silver, and Gold distinctions.
The programming site is so engaging that it gets 81% of its weekly visits from the global developer population, with over 23 million questions and more than 34 million answers.
3. Spotify Wrapped Badge
Spotify, a digital music, podcast, and video service app, gamified year-end engagement by letting people walk down a memory lane regarding top artists, most played songs, podcasts, etc.
Speaking of their gamification, Spotify added badges, quizzes, sharable stories, and more. The app awarded Premium users with badges based on their listening activity.
- Tastemaker badge: If a user’s playlist gains significant new followers
- Pioneer badge: If a user listened to a song before it hit 50,000 streams
- Collector badge: If the number of songs a user added to playlists in 2023
(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Spotify’s views
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)
The #SpotifyWrapped marketing campaign trends yearly with 443k posts on Instagram and over 66 billion views on TikTok and X.
4. Zomato Badges
2021 was a challenging year due to the pandemic, and acknowledging the uncertainty and chaos it had put people through, Zomato decided to end 2021 on a happy note using badge gamification.
The year-end gamification strategy by this online food delivery app was executed conveniently, allowing users to open the Zomato app and click on the ‘2021 Badges’ banner to see what they had earned.
Upon visiting the badges page, users could tap forward in a progress bar format to see badges they earned basis their app engagement, similar to an Instagram story.
(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Zomato’s views
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)
Zomato smartly leveraged the social psychological factor attached to badges to ensure that users could share them as posts and stories over social media.
Result? Social media engagement and branding!
#Zomato2021Badges trended over Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, with people sharing their badges and appreciating Zomato for their initiative.
5. Newegg EggPoints Badge
So far, we’ve understood that brands award customers badges for loyalty. But that’s not the only way badge gamification is done in customer loyalty programs.
You might be fascinated that a company challenges users to shop for products with a badge to win perks.
In 2020, Newegg, a California-based online retailer specialising in computer hardware and consumer electronics, launched the EggPoints Loyalty Program.
Their Point-based loyalty program was tailored to use badges in a new way to challenge and incentivise user actions on the Newegg website.
Like most loyalty programs, customers could earn EggPoints by purchasing eligible items, actively participating in promotional events, providing feedback, etc.
However, users could also purchase products that show the EggPoints badge on the product page. Every 100 EggPoints are worth $1 off.
(Disclaimer: This image is for informational purposes only. Opinions or points expressed represent Newegg’s views
and don’t necessarily represent the official position or policies of Gamize by OGL.)
EggPoints remains exclusive to redemption on Newegg products, fostering a compelling incentive for customers to explore and invest in Newegg’s offerings.
This exclusivity propels additional purchases and enables loyalty program managers to discern prevalent purchasing patterns and identify high-demand products during point redemption.
Today, Newegg boasts a substantial loyalty user base exceeding 40 million.
Badgify Your Loyalty Program
In today’s ever-evolving market, where engagement and retention remain crucial, badge gamification integration is a transformative force in cultivating customer loyalty.
Leveraging gamification mechanics, the above companies and more have successfully incentivised customer participation, elevated brand loyalty, and enhanced overall user engagement.
The diverse range of loyalty programs demonstrates the versatility and effectiveness of badge gamification in catering to varied customer needs and preferences.
As businesses continue to harness the power of gamified experiences, badge gamification emerges as a pivotal tool. Adding one at the click of a button becomes all the more critical.
That’s why when considering adding badges for user loyalty and engagement instantly, one must think of gamification software like Gamize to save technical costs and building and maintenance time.
