I first heard about Kiip on the latest episode of Foundation. Kevin and Tony talked about Brian (Founder of Kiip) and how brilliant of a guy this young entrepreneur is. Brian's story alone is worth an entire post but for the purpose of this one, I'm going to focus on his latest venture: Kiip.
Kiip came out of stealth mode today and just to give you an idea of how big this move was, here's who talked about it: Mashable, Wired, TechCrunch, Forbes, Bloomberg, Techland, Techvibes and probably even more sources that I didn't come across. This level of attention is nearing color's level but with one big difference... right off the bat, Kiip makes sense.
I'm not going to go into detail about the mechanics behind how exactly Kiip works for 2 reasons: 1. All the brilliant aforementioned sources have already done a great job of that and 2. I sort of understand the business model but not 100% just yet (so I asked a question on Quora about it). In the founder's own words though Kiip is a 'rewards network' that is meant to reward mobile gamers with tangible goods provided by certain partnering brands. So for instance, if you complete a story of Angry Birds you may potentially win a box of chips or if you become the mayor of Home Depot you may win a new set of gloves... you get the idea. The brilliance of the entire platform is really in its simplicity.
Here are 2 reasons why marketers should be all over Kiip:
1. An army of advocates - The beauty of mobile games is how much people talk about them and share stories around them. I am almost certain that if you are reading this blog you have discussed or heard someone discussing Angry Birds at least once in the past month. Imagine if people discussed your brand that often? Marketers have the opportunity here to create really unique rewards and offer them through Kiip's platform to a group of inherently social individuals. The opportunity to create a group of highly motivated brand advocates can easily be triggered by offering a relevant and unique award (e.g. Dr. Pepper could create and offer a new drink only to users of this platform).
2. Positive reinforcement - This reward behaviour trumps all others when it comes to human psychology. The purpose behind any kind of reinforcement principle is to increase a desired behaviour. The beauty about Kiip is that it offers marketers a chance to positively reward consumers for something they already like doing. To a consumer this is basically the ultimate win-win situation. I am doing something I love .. and getting rewarded for doing it! Even if the reward is not necessarily relevant to you, Kiip allows you to email it to someone who you think it may be relevant to... that is social 101... that is brilliance.
Final thoughts: Kiip is playing for keeps. Brian Wong set out to refresh the mobile advertising experience and Kiip is certainly on its way to doing just that. Kiip has given marketers and game developers alike, a serious opportunity to delight an already engaged audience. I cannot wait to see how this evolves.
