Assessing the relationship between gamified advertising and in-app purchases: a consumers’ benefits-based perspective

Purchase through mobile apps (m-commerce) is on the rise. While this phenomenon is affecting any consumers cohort, millennials represent the lion’s share among m-commerce users. Businesses are anyway struggling to better obtain the attention of a younger consumers. Indeed, the more competitors start to use m-commerce, the more differentiating communication strategies get difficult. To continue to attract the consideration from younger consumers, marketers are therefore adopting gamification as a strategic marketing lever. Thus, gamified advertisings -which are advertising characterized by high interactivity and game-like features- are becoming a trending topic in marketing literature. Building on Use and Gratification Theory (UGT) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the research wishes to explore how consumers’ experience deriving from Gamified Advertising (GAMEX) could contribute to the creation of consumers’ benefits and their intention to purchase trough a mobile app. How gamification experience could correspondingly shape the attitude toward advertising has also been considered. To achieve the aim of the research, a structural model was tested trough data collected from 315 millennials living in the UK. Results show how a relationship between gamification induced experiences could foster in-app purchases. Anyway, such a connection is mediated by perceived consumer-benefits, their attitude toward advertising, and perceived advertising effectiveness. Gamified advertising thus can be effective if it could foster social, personal, hedonic and cognitive benefits, and whether gamification is perceived coherent with the advertised product/brand pair.