Understanding Teen & Young Adult Values Through Gamification

It is hard to understand the teen and young adult mindset. And it is even harder to ask them to participate in a survey and get quality responses. They get bored quickly and it is a bit harder to ask them to reflect upon themselves and provide feedback over abstract concepts.

This is where leveraging technology and gamification step in.

The Challenge

One of the leading FMCG brands has been trying to understand the teen and young adult mindset, specifically, which core values they deem highly nowadays to fine-tune their positioning among this audience and

Our Approach

Whichever approach that we would take, we decided to triangulate our data gathering process. We wanted to capture data from different data nodes to decrease bias, which researchers are very prone to when trying to understand teenagers and young adults. We decided to gather data through 3 different methods.

1. Netnography: Netnography is basically ethnography through digital mediums. It is different than utilizing secondary data. In this case, one of our anthropologists leveraged dating apps to meet new people and get honest feedback on different topics
2. Metaphor elicitation: We utilized pictures/metaphors to understand the consumer psyche over their core values.
3. Baloon Game: Through the Uservision platform, we created a game, where we could analyze the values of teens and young adults without surveying them. We created an interface where we introduced a hot air balloon that is going to crush to the land because its load is too heavy. The load is comprised of many different core values. We asked the participants to throw away these core values to decrease the load. During the process, we analyzed which value has been thrown away first and how fast the consumers threw away these values, and when do they hesitate among different values to understand their perception.

Sample Balloon Game

The Results

The FMCG brand shifted its whole youth strategy according to the outputs from the report. They launched TV ads and optimized their digital marketing according to the report.

Despite the unfavorable economic conditions, the brands closed that year with significant growth over their target segments.