Purpose: Retailers increasingly are using gamification to make the customer experience (CX) more exciting and encourage favourable customer outcomes. This paper aims to conceptualise the gamified customer experience (GCX), including relevant affordances, and investigate its effects on key customer outcomes, as well as its influential factors. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a qualitative interview study with retail customers and gamification experts, plus a scenario-based experiment to test the hypotheses. Findings: Five distinct affordances induced by game elements in retail have led to a more exciting CX. The connections between these affordances and the holistic CX have led to a GCX that influences customer engagement, satisfaction and brand attitude. This effect is dependent on different factors, e.g. retail brand personality, customers’ shopping motivation and fear of manipulation. Originality/value: This study contributes to retail research by conceptualising the GCX phenomenon and providing a summary of relevant affordances. It further provides insights into the GCX’s effects on customer outcomes and influential factors, some of which have been ignored in previous research

The purpose of this study is to understand how gamification contributes to customers’ value creation in a retail context and how this value creation relates to brand engagement. The study builds on a field experiment using a two-group between-subjects design combined with correlational research. The experiment involved 378 participants recruited at a major European sports retailer. Participants were exposed to one of two conditions: one with a gamified activity in a store, and one in which the participants performed the same activity without being exposed to any game elements. The findings show that gamification affects the hedonic value of an activity and that this effect can be partly explained by positive affect. When this hedonic value was compared to the satisfaction with a reward, the hedonic value was found to be a better predictor of continued engagement intention. Finally, gamification through continued engagement intention is positively associated with brand engagement.

Traditional retailers are facing strong competition from e-commerce. One way to meet this challenge is to follow the marketing movement of focusing on customer experiences. This transformation is based on the notion of engaging customers and one way to drive this engagement is through gamification to support value creation. In this study, we have identified variables affecting intentions to use gamified services and in what ways. For this purpose, we developed an app that generated different levels of gamification by varying the number of game elements. The data from a survey distributed during a field experiment indicates that an increasing level of gamification and technology experience have direct positive associations with intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, intrinsic motivation has a positive direct association with satisfaction, although this is partly mediated by mood. Finally, satisfaction has a positive direct relation with intention to use.