Gamification and Marketing Management: A Literature Review and Future Agenda

Given the motivational effect of game elements and mechanisms on user experience in various non-game contexts, gamification has widely been used as an effective marketing technique to enhance the performance of business practices. In the past decade, a variety of studies have explored and investigated the value that gamification can provide in consumer-facing marketing activities. However, there is still a dearth of granular understanding of how gamification in marketing has been studied in the current literature. This paper follows the PRISMA literature review process and systematically reviews 93 papers consisting of 111 empirical studies on gamification and marketing management. The synthesized findings provide a holistic picture of the adopted research methods, different investigated gamification affordances and advergames, various gamified industries, and marketing performance indicators regarding products, services, and brands. Five agenda points, mainly relating to methodology and themes, are further suggested.