Chapter 3: A Cross-Country Analysis of Gamified App Users across the Consumer Buying Journey: The Case of Nykaa and Boots

Gamified mobile apps can help brands achieve their marketing objectives by providing them with a vehicle to facilitate superior customer experiences and achieve a competitive advantage in the process of shaping the customer journey. Even though gamification has advanced as a significant strategy to influence and maintain customer experience, engagement, and loyalty in online retail settings, there remains a dearth of research evidence complementing this notion in hedonic industrial contexts, particularly through longitudinal studies. This chapter utilizes a systematic approach to map 52 game elements to tap and explore the potential of gamification in context of beauty retail across the mobile apps of two countries, i.e., India and the United Kingdom, through an event study spanning a period of 14 days. The data have been analyzed from the perspectives of the User types hexad and the Octalysis framework, both of which are well-established gamification frameworks. The findings discuss how game designers and marketing managers work in synchronization to introduce different game elements throughout the buying journey depending on the stages (i.e., discovery, onboarding, scaffolding, and endgame) the consumers encounter on the gamified app, rather than embedding all the game elements at the same time, and also discuss the significant role of consumers’ cultural dispositions in making gamification a successful marketing technique.