most consoles, the Wii keeps track of your bowling scores, tennis skill level, and even time spent playing. It actually speaks back to you, sending you emails from characters in the games and inviting you to connect your Wii with your friends’ through its built-in Wi-Fi.

The Wii’s friendly, interactive approach has birthed a unique user experience in the real life, in-person “Wii party,” what one blogger calls “Tupperware parties for dudes.” Did Nintendo start this phenomenon for promotion? Begun by users and then latched onto by savvy Nintendo marketers? Hard to say. But the success of Wii parties as a grassroots, bottom-up marketing tool is undeniable. Evite.com even has a section of specially designed Wii-party invitations. After trying out the system with their friends, players become customers who become brand champions.

A new genre of gaming, alternate-reality games, or ARGs, have attracted millions of players around the globe who work collectively to solve puzzles, find clues, and answer riddles. ARGs have been used to promote movies such as “Cloverfield” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” or a Nine Inch Nails’ release, but ARGs don’t promote products overtly. Key to the experience is the denial from the top that the games even exist, all the while immersing players in a brand experience that spills out from their computer and into real life.

The 2001 ARG tied to the Steven Spielberg movie “Artificial Intelligence: AI” was one of the first to inspire users to collaborate in online groups. Indeed, the games are far too complex

to be solved alone, writes Jane McGonigal, an ARG designer and a Ph.D. scholar of play.

In the AI game, known as The Beast, “players were also charged with cracking complicated and time-consuming puzzles that variously required programming, translating and hacking skills, obscure knowledge of literature, history and the arts, and brute computing force,” McGonigal writes. ARG players create their own tribes around the game, and by extension, the products the game explores.

Play Means Serious Business

Recently, my partner and I met with an intriguing young company. Though the principals were in their 20s, they had just secured their second round of funding, had achieved a respectable level of sales, and were growing according to plan—a success story in the making.

In terms of the product strategy, marketing, and business model, they hired only the foremost experts in their field to mentor them. Down to the pixel, their website had every usable feature, gave them credibility by quoting third-party “expert” endorsements, and featured all the other best practices that have been proven to work.

They forgot one key ingredient: Their brand platform was devoid of engagement, lacking a level of play that resonates with their ethos.

Companies that invite us to play invite us to make their offerings our own, and then we buy and “tell a friend” about it. Perhaps we even syndicate it on Digg or back to Facebook. Increasingly, such endorsements drive the choices buyers make.

When you let your audience play with your brand, they become part of it. They volunteer for your army. They recommend your product or service. Play is now an imperative for companies wanting to lead. The interactive marketers at my firm are working to help those twen-tysomething entrepreneurs and other, older clients discover their own inner sense of play and how it relates to them, their brand, and their customers.

Since we could first interact with the world as babes, we’ve known how to play to learn and develop. Grownups need to rediscover that sense and know that it’s okay—no, necessary—to play in business, if the business wants to keep learning and developing. For a company to become an icon, and thus reach its market potential, our global culture demands playfulness.

I just compared movie tastes on Facebook with a senior vice president from a major lending institution, a former client. Another friend—a venture capitalist—turned me into a vampire, then sent me a private post. He is ready to play, and that could mean serious business.

 

ABOUT ThE AUThOr Michael Graber is the managing director of the Southern Growth Studio, a brand-marketing and product-innovation firm. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies and startups in various roles: information architecture, brand strategist, and innovation director. At the Studio, Graber leads clients through innovation implementations and brand transformations, and validates product concepts from both user-experience and business-model perspectives.

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July + August 2008