How Friendefi uses gamification to build alliances between brands and consumers

Friendefi is set to make waves in the gamification industry by tackling it from the foundation. Instead of taking on gamification for brands on an individual basis, the Montreal-based company built a platform upon which companies can create gamified processes for brand loyalty.

Aaron Carr, the founder of Friendefi, devised the idea while attending a conference on travel technology in 2011. At the time, Carr was working in product development for Aeroplan and was attending the conference to hear a presentation by Facebook.

“It struck me that neither Aeroplan, nor any other loyalty program, was rewarding its membership for interacting with the program through social media.  As I worked that insight into a business concept over the coming months, it also became apparent to me that rewarding consumers for doing stuff through social media wasn’t enough,” says Carr in an email. “The concept needed to address broader program engagement issues – and gamification officially became a part of Friendefi’s solution.”

At the end of summer 2012, Carr left his position at Aeroplan to focus solely on Friendefi. He recalls that it took a few months to convince his previous employer that they needed to do more to engage their members through social media platforms, but eventually he won out. “[T]hey loved the idea of introducing gamification into the program,” recalls Carr.

Friendefi’s first project was Star Challenge, an Aeroplan game run on Facebook’s platform that allowed members to sign in with their membership numbers and earn points for interacting with the content and completing various social media actions.

“It was simple but it was a great start,” says Friendefi’s founder, “We quickly learned that members were not at all hesitant to share and invite their friends – especially where Aeroplan rewards were concerned.”

One feature that Friendefi added to the Facebook program was a leaderboard of competitors’ friends, where participants could monitor and compare themselves to their Facebook friends who were also engaged in Aeroplan’s initiative.

“We’ve talked to a number of other loyalty programs in Canada, the USA, Mexico, and in Europe,” says Carr. “Similar themes keep emerging – getting their memberships engaged with the programs’ social media channels and creating fun, interactive experiences where members can compete and earn rewards.”

Friendefi’s founder adds that for the most part, challenges for gamification fall into two broad categories that the company aims to embrace – education and engagement where participants learn about the company’s offerings, or transactional behaviour where valuable actions are rewarded. While an educational program may result in a leaderboard with points, a game involving transactional behaviour may return badges alongside a leaderboard for increasingly involved actions that participants complete – for example a specific type of purchasing activity, says Carr.

While Friendefi’s approach could be applied to almost any consumer product category – regardless of a loyalty program, Carr says that their focus will always be consumer-oriented gamification and not enterprise-employee oriented, but he adds, “That’s a huge market opportunity and we’re only just starting out.”

That said, Friendefi is prepared and agile enough to create unique strategies for any partner. While some clients want actual “mini-games,” says Carr, “[O]thers only want a little bit of gamification added to their program experience.”

Carr adds that developing the range of options is necessary to fulfilling what loyalty programs are hungry to offer their memberships in 2014.