“Playing Games with Customers”

“Playing Games with Customers”
Ferrazzi, Keith
Chen, Jane
Li, Zhan
Harvard Business Review
Apr2003, Vol. 81 Issue 4, p21


SUMMARY

Public loves computer gaming. Some big companies started to use games in their marketing, training, and recruiting tool kits. Car companies, for example, found that on-line games were a good tool to advertise vehicles. Fourteen percent of all orders for new Jeep were from people who played “Wrangler Rubicon” game that promoted this new model. Chrysler studied buyer’s sector of women ages 34 to 49 by “Get Up and Go”, “Cosmo Quiz” format game-test. The company also collected data, such as e-mail addresses and some demographic information, while intermittently displaying information about the company’s cars when women played. Games can help build a dialog with consumers and collect all kinds of useful information. Nike, for example, stored information about colors that children liked to wear.
The...