E-Commerce Gamification: The Effect of gameful Experience (Gamex) and Game Design on The Self-brand Connection

Abstract

The potential of e-commerce is vast in supporting consumption-driven Indonesian economics. E-commerce has also become the leading marketing platform for SMEs during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although supported by growing and dynamic e-commerce start-up ecosystem, Indonesian e-commerce still has several weaknesses in retaining their loyal consumers, such as less effective and innovative banner blindness due to consumer avoidance of e-commerce advertisements. In the other side, unique value proposition is needed when Indonesian e-commerce market gets saturated due to fierce competition and low barrier for new competitors. Hence, an effective marketing strategy is essential to increase brand engagement of e-commerce consumers with gamification. This study aims to examine the effect of gameful experience (GAMEX) and game design of e-commerce advergames on self-brand connections that motivate purchases, which were previously studied separately by researchers. By including the brand engagement variable as a mediation on this effect, this study also examine the emotional and cognitive engagement on self-brand connections resulted by experiential marketing. This experimental study employed quantitative approach to 250 frequent e-commerce users. The results shows a positive and significant effect of gameful experience and game design elements on self-brand connection mediated by brand engagement. This study is expected to make a practical contribution to e-commerce marketers and UX designers, identify and recommend experimental qualities in e-commerce advergame design to engage loyal customers which influence their purchasing intention that directly supports the business sustainability of SMEs in e-commerce platform.