In March, Domino’s Pizza joined the growing list of brands using price gamification tactics in order to drive consumer interest  -  holding what it called a  “Tweet Treat” initiative at its Lincoln branch which saw the price of its pepperoni pizza falling as more and more people “Tweeted” about it on social networks.

Running between 9am and 11am on March 5th, the offer was, so the brand said, an attempt to reward customers and increase lunchtime orders - with Twitter and Facebook members being invited to use a “#LetsDoLunch” hashtag in order to influence the final price. Those who chose to participate were then able to purchase the pizza through the Domino’s website once the "reverse auction" had closed.

At the start of April, Domino's ran a similar initiative at its Milton Keynes branch, with prices for five large pizzas falling by at least a penny each time a relevant hashtag was posted (to a minimum of £6.50 per pizza - with the final price in this instance being £6.98). And it says it has plans take the Tweet Treat proposition to other outlets across the country in the coming weeks.

From Uniqlo to Innocent, Gap to Swedish supermarket ICA Vanadis, examples of retailers adopting a more playful approach to RRP are very quickly multiplying in number. Can we thus imagine a not-too-distant future where real-time sales monitoring and continuously adjusted price display support increasingly personalised deals? Will playful and game-like interactions be used more frequently to engage, entertain and create closer bonds with consumers in conventional retail spaces as well as online and on mobile platforms? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnePffoZs_k[/youtube]

A New Zealand firm called Halo IPT has developed a power pad that is able to wirelessly charge any electric vehicle that parks on it.  While this has significant implications for the future of mobility, it also opens up more possibilities for the more technologically-enhanced cars of the future.

For a while I have thought that one of the greatest benefits of EVs is not the cleanliness of their performance but the fact the act of charging is also a chance to connect your vehicle to other information networks.  On nVision recently, we promoted our nVitro trend “Data, data everywhere” to full key trend status after our latest research confirmed what a strong theme this will be for the next decade.  As more objects like cars and even buildings begin transmitting information, the internet will make the jump into the real world and consumers will be able to make meaningful connections to physical objects.

Using technology like the above, cars will soon be able to park and charge wirelessly and it’s not a great jump to foresee them connecting to the wider web at the same time.  Beyond that, all new vehicles will come with more advanced connectivity.  In the not-too-distant future, we will have multi-platform mobility solutions like Mu from Peugeot and be able to manage it from smartphones.  I will drive my  EV to designated parking spaces on the outskirts of town before using a smartphone app to unlock a nearby bicycle to cycle into my office in the pedestrianised centre of the city.  After work, I use the app to unlock a docked motorised electric scooter to pick up some shopping on the way back to my car.

I get back into my car and the screen on the dashboard connects me to my account and I pay for the day’s use of transportation directly from my vehicle while it tallies the mobility points that I have gathered throughout the day.  Then, if I may borrow the gaming concept from a couple of other posts, I see that my green mobility choices have promoted me to the top of a league table of my local area and so unlocked new bonus discounts from my local supermarket.

This is just one possible example but it’s easy to see how the data, data everywhere trend will make concepts like these a reality over the coming years and the trend could potentially revolutionise the relationships that your customers have with your products.  Time to start planning for a connected future.

It seems that gaming is very much in the news at the moment as marketers, community activists, governments and other individuals and institutions wake up to the potential that games and game-like structures offer. One reason is clearly the alignment of the kinds of gaming incentives that I spoke about at our client conference (available on nVision for subscribers) with the excitement that still surrounds Nudge and the solutions it hints at to a variety of social problems. For an interesting take on the latter, I suggest you check out Adam Curtis’ excellent blog where he puts nudge into its intellectual context.

One manifestation of games-as-social-engineering comes from Knight Foundation in the USA, whose Macon Money (hat tip: Contagious) uses a sort of alternative currency to incentivise people to form new friendships in the community of Macon, Georgia. (nVision subscribers can read more about alternative currencies on our nVitro piece, “All that glisters”.)

Games are finding their way into reality in other ways, too. Nukotoys have a genius-sounding concept ready for launch involving a card-trading game (like Pokemon) in which each card has an embedded RFID chip which will trigger all sorts of exciting added features when scanned by the accompanying hardware. As well as allowing for interactive game elements alongside the social buzz of trading cards, it gives Nukotoys potentially valuable information about the social networks of its game players – if a scanned card once belonged to me, and now it belongs to you, that indicates that we swapped it, and therefore that we know each other. Social network analysis on these data could lead to the identification of influential players, and possibilities for extremely targeted marketing.