At JollyDeck, one of the questions we hear quite a bit is, ‘What kind of demographics can we expect to reach with a campaign?’.
In short our clients want to know, ‘Will our employees really play?’ They’re curious if their workforce will actually engage with and adopt this new training method centered around social gaming. This is an understandable concern and a great question, which we hope to answer in this post.
We keep our launch process simple so when we register users we don’t ask about age, race or gender – we just want to know what cool nickname you pick out for your avatar. This means we don’t have demographics within JollyDeck campaigns, but what we can say is we have launched our trainings to users from 18 to over 60 within industries from finance and telecommunications to energy and contact centres and we’ve successfully engaged with everyone from fresh graduates to heads of departments. We always hear the same feedback from our clients: their players love training with JollyDeck, regardless of who they are.
This feedback matches current trends which are happening in the world of social gaming, another way to understand JollyDeck’s demographic reach is to have a peek into this world. Anytime you enter the social gaming conversation demographics is going to play a large part. The social gaming industry is not only one of the fastest growing industries in the world, but also one of the most researched. According to Business Insider the social gaming market is on track to reach over $5 billion by 2015. As more people operate their day-to-day lives with the help from smartphones and tablets and the mobility of gaming gets easier the overall consumer base for social gaming continues to grow.
And according to a study from Inside Social Game the crowd of 35 – 54 year olds are making up 41 percent of the social gamers. In fact the highest growing age group in social gaming is coming from the over 50 crowd. According to Proelios report, US consumers aged 50+ have adopted mobile games at a startling 148% YoY while European consumers 50+ are adopting it at an impressive 66% YoY.
Gaming is no longer an adolescent teen’s world. Just as the male business professionals of all ages are adopting an interest in gaming so are women. In fact a recent study done by SponsorPay, an ad group within gaming, showed that women make up a larger percentage of players than men in both the social and mobile gaming world. So for our clients who fear their older, more professional-esque crowd of dedicated, hard-working employees won’t readily adopt a JollyDeck training we understand the concern, but can confidently say, ‘the stats are ever in our favour’.
We won’t claim everyone will love JollyDeck, but as our own stats show over 90% of our players have liked and loved us. The reason is not because we’re better than CandyCrush or Monument Valley, but because we’re more exciting and fun than a click-through, grey-screened training module known in the HR and Learning & Development world as a CBT (computer-based training). We use the principles which makes gaming fun: rewards, leaderboards, social competition and engagement and these have successfully made training fun too! And when it comes to our demographics, all ages, races and genders love FUN and our engagement rates prove that is true, every time.