How a suitcase full of money and an iPod help sell tea

If you make boring tasks fun, people won't mind doing them. 

How about brand guidelines. Manuals in which companies describe everything related to colors, logo positioning, taglines, appropriate images, etc.

Although it can be an interesting document to flick through, reading and studying every line of it requires a lot more effort. Especially in case it is a big brand. But for people that use the brand every day, knowing these rules and applying them consistently is a pretty important part of the job.

So imagine you are responsible to create a new version of your company's brand guidelines. You can put in many hours to create an interesting and good looking document. But  if you know people won't use it,  you can save a lot of time and money.

This is what happened at Lipton. So for their new brand guidelines they got some outside help. Advertising agency DDB Hongkong was hired to make the whole process more fun and engaging. 

Because of this campaign the knowledge of the Lipton brand is at an all-time high in the Asia Pacific region. And it is not the first time that game elements show their effect in the business world.

How game mechanics made this campaign work

First of all every brand manager got an iPod to play around with. Each of these devices came with a quiz application called Lipton Millionaire. In order to do well in this game, users needed to study the brand using the interactive version of the brand guidelines.

All the quiz results were uploaded to an online leaderboard. This allowed brand managers to compare their scores with those of their colleagues. And this increased competition, encouraging them to do the quiz again and rank higher.

To ensure everybody would keep using it they included a virtual prize for the end winner of the game.

There is no doubt that managers spent more time learning about the brand using these tools.  But the question remains how sustainable an  initiative like this is.

Do you think it works because it fancy and new? Or can it really help people to learn new things?

Please share your opinion in the comments!