Using computer games to train brand ambassadors
20th April 2006 by Anders Gronstedt
A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that there are many more women gamers in the 25-34 demographic than males, largely because of the popularity of the casual games market, with card games like solitaire (pictured) and puzzle games like Tetris. Meanwhile, legions of elementary school kids are busy supporting families, balancing their check books, finding jobs and getting lives - all by playing SIMS.
Clearly, gaming has finally come of age as a mainstream form of entertainment. However, most people go from a Jetsons home to a Flintstones workplace each day. The frontline ambassadors of most leading brands receive their training and communications on how to represent the brand via faceless, formal, one-way, artificially objective decrees from the top.
If your seven year-old child can learn to fly an airplane or build a profitable entertainment park with a video game, why couldn’t the same kind of engaging technology be used to teach your sales staff to sell consultatively and understand their clients’ business? If 24 million Americans are carrying their iPods everywhere they go, why can’t they listen and learn more about their jobs through those devices? If the average American is spending 40 minutes of work time a day reading blogs (as one recent study suggests), why can’t they use that time to blog about work-related issues with their colleagues?
The brand experience starts and ends with people. It’s the people on the phone and in the store who are the voice and the face of the brand. In many respects, training and internal communications to improve brand performance are the last frontiers for organizational improvement. For a function that’s largely responsible for customer-interface performance, it has received remarkably little executive attention or investment. The emerging phenomena of blogging, podcasting and game-based simulations might just be the engines required to drive a consistent brand delivery across all human touch points.
December 1st, 2006 at 8:36 am
Anders — do you have examples? I am looking for a way to “train” employees to live the brand without resorting to cheesy one-way programs that won’t be remembered.