While Candy Crush has gone the way of MySpace and the Pokemon Go craze has tapered off, gaming still has a stronghold in our culture. And there are a lot of parallels between gaming and retail, both in technology use and the attention to the customer experience. Just as there are different gamers who need to be engaged in different ways, there are consumers who have different needs and expectations.
With all the new entrants and a different playing field, loyalty marketers are not ruing as they did in the good old days when they had the consumer gaming dynamic all to themselves. Quite the contrary -- there is palpable excitement surrounding what the growing shift in consumer behavior means for their programs. Armed with a seemingly endless choice of game mechanics, technology platforms and social networks to enable new programs and a new set of consumer experiences, the loyalty sector is now more relevant than ever.