From Gamification to Legal Letters: The Neuromarketing Story
How neuromarketing in a Mario-style game might influence player perceptions.
Actually, this is the first time I’m spilling the beans on this smol story. No need for an intro or hook here. It’s short and spicy 🌶️
The situation
I kicked off my career at Orange as a trade marketing coordinator and eventually moved into a product owner role. When Orange was acquired by Ucom, another telco company, I pivoted into digital marketing and built the digital marketing team from scratch. This story takes us back to those early, formative days.
The game
During the New Year holidays in 2018, Ucom launched a Mario-like online game called Santa Gigabaytus. Picture this: players could collect smartphones and gigabytes to win cool stuff—iPhones, headsets, mobile data, and more.
When Santa hit the 4G+ sign, he’d get a speed boost and superpowers. At the time, Ucom was using that 4G+ icon heavily in our communications. So, the association should have been clear to customers.
Btw, don’t judge the design too harshly—it was a template game, and we didn’t have much room for customization. To be fair, it was more of an experiment—we were just testing the waters.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. When Santa hit a stone with a 3G sign, he lost a life. Worse, if he hit a box he was toast. Some people thought that the colors were associated with the branding of our competitors, Beeline and Viva 🐝 ❤️
If you’re curious, just hit play on the video below. I’ve saved a screen recording—because who doesn’t love a good throwback? 🎥
After the game ended, users who wanted to find out when the results would be announced were encouraged to join Ucom Online Shop’s Messenger bot. The bot was designed to engage users and build relationships while also promoting our hottest New Year offers.
On top of that, we could later send targeted messages directly through Facebook Messenger to these subscribers, aiming to convert them with mid-funnel content. Oh, and participants had to like the Facebook page, share the post, yada yada…boring but effective!
So… why?
Before diving into the “why,” let’s take a moment to talk a bit about neuromarketing. In simple terms, neuromarketing is the science behind why we buy products. It blends neuroscience with marketing to understand how our brains react to different marketing stimuli. According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. When marketing a product to a consumer, it's most effective to target the subconscious mind.
So, back to the “why” of this story:
In 2016, Ucom made a significant leap by upgrading its network to 4G+/LTE Advanced, while our closest competitor, Beeline, was still lagging behind with 3G. This created an opportunity for us—a unique sales proposition to attract customers from Beeline. Neuromarketing could have been helpful here. The goal was to create an image in the minds of game players that subtly reinforced Ucom’s superiority.
It was another fun activity to engage with users and build relationships with them.
Boost our social media presence and grow our Messenger bot subscriber base.
We got a love letter 💌
I was expecting Beeline’s legal notice and was fully prepared to swap out the “provocative” colors in a flash to dodge any lawsuits. In fact, we made the change in just 5 minutes. Sure enough, their letter arrived 12-15 days after the launch, but by then, the New Year had already passed, so we’re good 👿
Stats for nerds marketers
Here’s a snapshot of the metrics we tracked:
Number of games played - 210,896
Unique number to players - 6,770
Facebook page likes uplift - 5,184
Messenger chatbot subscribers uplift - 2,806
I believe the real value of this story is the neuromarketing—the image we aimed to draw in the brains of the game players. However, as with most neuromarketing efforts, its impact isn’t something we could measure.
I can’t wrap this up without giving a big thanks to the management for giving this the green light and the marketing team for their awesome collaboration 💚
🔔 If this story caught your interest, feel free to join the Telegram channel and subscribe here on Substack to keep up with all the latest InsightOut Marketing stories.
P.S.
Book recommendation! If you’re eager for a deep dive into neuromarketing with loads of practical examples and theory, I highly recommend Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy by Phil Barden. Here’s the aff link to grab a copy: Decoded on Amazon.