As economic uncertainty reshapes consumer behavior and shoppers are more cautious than ever, B2C marketers struggle to maintain customer engagement, loyalty, and trust. Brands need fresh tools to motivate behaviors and create emotional connections, without racing to the bottom on price. That’s where gamified promotions come in.
These types of engagement promotions—chances to win, trivia, branded mini-games, challenges—create incentive-based interactions that deliver value to both parties. Consumers get a fun moment with a brand, rewards, and a break from life’s stresses, while brands get consumer data, attention, and an opportunity to drive behaviors and incremental sales.
Here are the top three reasons gamified promotions are the secret weapon for keeping customers engaged and loyal when they aren’t spending as much money with your brand.
Reason #1: Gamified promotions help you step away from discounting
When consumers’ purse strings are tight, the reflex is to lower prices to help drive short-term sales; however, heavy discounting can chip away at margins, erode brand value, and condition customers to wait for markdowns.
Instead, use gamified promotions to provide a value exchange and tap into emotional motivations rather than transactional ones. These moments of joy and achievement create positive associations with your brand that persist long after a promotion ends. This translates to increased purchase consideration, even when competitors offer lower prices.
Example: Chances to win
On average, we see 55% of participants opt in to marketing communications or loyalty programs when entering these types of gamified promotions. These experiences tap into the excitement of possibility, creating anticipation and emotional lift. Instead of conditioning customers to expect markdowns, give them an exciting reason to interact with your brand.
Reason #2: Gamified promotions provide a way for customers to spend time with your brand
In the crowded marketplace, consumers are bombarded with messages, ads, and offers at every turn, yet most of these touchpoints are temporary. Gamification transforms brand interactions from passive scrolling to active participation, turning fleeting moments into meaningful engagement. Rather than passively skimming over another marketing email or push notification, consumers actively participate by clicking, playing, and tracking progress. Every extra minute of interaction builds familiarity, consideration, and emotional loyalty.
Example: Branded mini-games
We’ve seen over eight minutes of in-app engagement with branded, skill-based mini-games, which can incorporate your products, values, or brand story to create memorable experiences that last long after consumers have finished playing. These multi-level games add fun, emotion, and competition to interactions, keeping customers entertained while also reinforcing brand identity through design, messaging, and rewards.
By giving customers something engaging (and even addictive!) to do, you extend the time they spend with your brand and increase the likelihood they’ll convert, return, or share the experience with others. These types of games also deliver brand exposure and valuable data on player preferences and behavior—insights that can inform future marketing messaging and campaigns.
Reason #3: Gamified promotions are a way to nudge behaviors in loyalty programs
Loyalty programs are a proven way to keep customers connected to your brand, but participation can drop off after initial sign-up. During times of economic pressure, this gap grows even wider as members focus on cutting costs instead of collecting points. When loyalty members are less engaged, gamification can change the dynamic and spark a reason to reengage, making the program feel fresh and rewarding.
Elements of progress, achievement, and recognition tap into fundamental human psychology and help motivate members to take actions that drive value for the brand. The beauty of gamification within a loyalty program is that it doesn’t just reward the end result (a purchase); it rewards engagement along the entire customer journey. This type of emotional commitment and motivation is particularly powerful during economic downturns, when customers are more selective about which brands deserve their dollars and continued loyalty.
Example: Loyalty challenges
We’ve seen that people who participate in loyalty program challenges purchase seven times more frequently than non-challenge participants. That’s the power of gamification at work. By introducing challenges with achievable goals, you keep members engaged and motivated while giving them a reason to interact with your brand beyond points and purchases.
Rewarding specific behaviors also creates urgency and momentum that can help transform passive members into active brand advocates. We architect challenges to be both engagement and purchase-based. Whether it's logging in daily, engaging with brand content, purchasing a new product, or visiting at specific times of day, these gamified elements make loyalty programs feel less transactional and more like an ongoing adventure with your brand.
Your secret weapon in action
In a volatile economy, every moment with a consumer matters. Gamified promotions don’t just engage people in the moment; they also give brands ongoing reasons to connect beyond routine marketing campaigns. Across both paid and owned channels, each gamified promotion creates a new occasion to reach consumers—whether it’s a PR push, an email, a loyalty app notification, a text, or a social post. By providing moments of fun, achievement, and reward, gamification turns this outreach into meaningful experiences that capture attention, extend time spent, and inspire action.
Brands that have already engaged consumers through entertaining and value-driven experiences have a significant advantage when customers are ready to buy. While competitors exhaust their audiences with discount-driven campaigns and promotional noise, brands investing in gamification build the emotional resilience needed to weather economic storms. Done well, gamified promotions strike the balance between business outcomes and consumer needs, making them one of the smartest investments during times of economic uncertainty.
