Explanation of gamification technology in business development

Entering the third millennium has increased the complexity of businesses. The use of new technologies has turned the age of communication into the age of trans-communication. Even now, games and game-related technologies have become an important part of everyday life and are expanding rapidly as media. Travel and tourism agencies, in most cases, sell tour packages with the characteristic of vacation packages, so they need a strong and significant insight in travel marketing and travel planning as well as pre-factors such as understanding customer engagement, increasing brand awareness and loyalty, and improving marketing efforts. Therefore, the problem of this research is how to explain the situation and combine the basic structures of tourism marketing and behavior and customer and brand engagement with the adoption of gamification technology. As stated, gamification is the game techniques of setting rules and arrangements of resources and business plans to design behaviors, develop skills, interact with people, and influence people's motivation or participation to solve complex problems and perform specific actions or entertainments. Accordingly, the most important research gap in this research is to use gamification technology in the development of businesses, especially travel agencies, to review concepts such as brand awareness, brand loyalty, and customer engagement in order to motivate tourists. The use of gamification elements can motivate tourists, take them out of boring tours, and increase their engagement with tours. In this way, a competitive advantage can be gained for tourism agencies. Considering the spread of the corona disease in the country over the past few years and the closure of tours during this period, which has caused a decrease in the number of tourists, the concept of gamification can create a new spirit in tourism and travel agencies can take an effective step in this positive direction through gamification technology. The purpose of this research is to explain the technology of gamification in business development, especially the rules of gamification technology for companies in foreign and interactive marketing.

This article explains gamification technology in businesses development. The research is a descriptive survey of correlation type in terms of data collection and applied in terms of purpose. The statistical population was the employees (300 people) of Tourism of Kermanshah Province who used travel agencies several times a year. Of them, 169 people were selected using Cochran's formula in a stratified coincidence method. The acceptance of technology questionnaire consisted of 14 questions, the gamification questionnaire had 3 questions, a brand awareness questionnaire made by the researcher had 5 questions, a questionnaire on loyalty to the brand developed by the researcher contained 4 questions, and the customer engagement questionnaire included 4 questions. They were used as the main data collection tools. The basis of the measurement scale was the five-point Likert scale. To confirm the validity, tests of convergent validity and divergent validity were carried out, and three criteria (factor loadings, Cronbach's alpha coefficient and composite reliability coefficient) were used to confirm the reliability. To examine the research hypotheses, structural equations modeling was done with the partial least squares method. This method is a combination of principal component analyses, which relates indicators to latent variables, and path analysis and creates a system of latent variables. The software used in this research was SMART-PLS.

As the testing of the hypotheses showed, the factors of hope for performance, hope for effort, social influence and facilitation of conditions affect the acceptance of gamification technology. Also, customer engagement has a significant effect on brand awareness and brand loyalty, and brand awareness has a direct and significant effect on brand loyalty. Finally, customer engagement can play a mediating role in the influence of technology adoption on brand awareness and loyalty as well as in the influence of brand awareness on brand loyalty.

The purpose of this research was to explain gamification technology in businesses development. With the designed model, travel agencies can use gamification to increase customer engagement and achieve brand awareness and loyalty in tourism.