What Pharma Is Learning From The Retail Industry: Gamification
By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA
Every day, someone I know through Facebook sends me a request to play a game: Words With Friends, Mafia Wars, Diamond Dash, Farmville…the list goes on and on. Facebook has certainly benefited from this interest in social gaming. The social media platform saw 12 percent of its revenue in 2011 come from the establishment of a relationship with social game developer Zynga.
This interest in gamification has carried over into several other industries and has become a hot marketing buzzword — and retail and pharma are no strangers to it. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, gamification is used to tap into customers’ desires to be challenged, achieve/master a task, and be rewarded for accomplishments. In the retail space, companies such as L Brands and The Home Shopping Network have added in-app scavenger hunts and slot-machine-like games to their apps to boost customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Pharma has also begun to accept the possibilities gamification could hold for bolstering relationships with patients. We’ve seen the popularity of activity trackers, such as FitBit, that track a person’s exercise, caloric intake, and other data. Some fitness apps even give you virtual trophies or rank your performance against your friends to create a healthy sense of competition. But Big Pharma has been taking a stab at gamification for drug development and clinical trials as well.
Boehringer Ingelheim launched a beta version of a game, “Syrum,” on Facebook in Europe back in 2012. The game offered players the opportunity to create their own pharma companies and develop drugs for a number of diseases, in turn educating the public about the challenges of drug development.
Seeing as the clinical space is faced with misperceptions and a general lack of awareness that hinders recruitment, gamification could be a good way to educate patients about the role clinical trials could play in treatment. Take the New England Research Institutes/NIH, for example, which recently launched a video game called “The Paper Kingdom” for kids ages 8-14. The game was created to confront and eliminate any common misconceptions kids might have about clinical trials. Given kids’ ease with technology these days, what better way to do educational outreach than through a channel with which they’re familiar?
Besides engagement, which is a prime goal for both the retail and clinical spaces, gamification could also play a role in helping pharma diagnose and determine the severity of certain diseases. For example, at the beginning of 2014, Pfizer teamed up with Akili Interactive Labs to conduct a clinical trial using a video game, “Evo Challenge,” to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. The game challenges patients to navigate a series of obstacles as researchers determine how well users can pay attention and make decisions when confronted with other distractions. Games have also offered a new way for researchers to explore movement in muscular dystrophy patients.
When it comes to retail, gamification has been a way to encourage what Forrester Research defines as “the four Is of engagement:” involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Investing in gamification to accomplish these “four Is” has paid off for some brands — for instance, L Brands, which I mentioned earlier, saw a 2 percent increase in sales during May 2014 following the launch of its new in-app scavenger hunt.
Judging from the results of a recent study, I think it’s also safe to expect that pharma will see the same returns — both financially and in terms of patient engagement. A recent HealthPrize Technologies’ study showed that gamification efforts led to a 54 percent increase in prescription fill rates, and often led to prescriptions being filled more frequently. Patients with acne, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma/COPD logged onto HealthPrize’s mobile and online platforms an average of 4 times a week to keep earning points and rewards. I think this is good news for the clinical space in particular, which can use gamification to not only boost education but can also keep patients engaged and dedicated to taking the necessary treatment throughout the course of the trial.
But even beyond this, I feel like gamification should be a step the pharma industry takes more regularly in the future. The pharma industry has starred in everyone’s life in some capacity or another, whether it be through over-the-counter meds, antibiotics, receiving a flu shot each year, or through more serious health issues/disease treatments and clinical trials. It seems to me that reaching out more regularly and in creative ways to patients through as common a channel as the cell phone can help make the pharma industry a much more approachable, personable, and every-day “brand.”