Peer Review

Two weeks into the Coursera gamification course and we hit the first real piece of coursework. With 60000+ students, expecting rigourous essays to be read, marked and feedback given was always going to be optimistic. Coursera rely heavily on peer assessment. The practical issues around getting students to evaluate each other's submissions are well-known, including the difficulty of maintaining consistent standards, and the risk of gender, racial or other biases.

Superfically the assessment exercise does not appear too onerous: produce a 300 word "essay". The essay question is: "You are an employee of Cereals Incorporated, a large manufacturer of breakfast food products.  Your supervisor, Madison County, approaches you because she knows you recently took a course on gamification, which she has heard will revolutionize marketing.

She tells you that Cereals Inc. is about to release a new line of ready-to-eat breakfast pastries, and she wants to know whether to use gamification as part of the marketing strategy.  The breakfast pastries will be aimed at the 18-35 age bracket. Surveys show members of this demographic often skip breakfast because they don’t want to eat the typical cereals of their youth, and they are too active to cook their own breakfasts.  Market research indicates that the pastries are likely to appeal more to women than men by a 65%-35% ratio. Cereals Inc. has a 35% share of the overall breakfast food market, but only a 10% share of the fragmented ready-to-eat segment. 

Provide as many reasons as you can why gamification could be a useful technique to apply to the situation your manager has presented to you.  Explain why these reasons address the specific scenario provided.   At this stage, focus on the problem rather than the solution.  In other words, describe the goals of the project, not the particular game elements or other techniques you plan to use.  We strongly encourage you to watch this week's lecture segments before attempting this assignment."

This is a rather odd question for a global course. It is not clear which country we are in and food marketing does seem to be cultually specific. If I had to guess, I would say it isn't DPRK. Not sure what the "fragmented ready-to-eat segment" is, but am confident I am not in it. But then 300 hundred words is not a lot.... I think my answer touches on  the course content, tangentially.


"Marion. I think that we should aim to make our target customers' engagement with our brand greater than simply viewing them as consumers. One way to achieve this is to introduce what is now termed "gamification": introducing an element where users can compete with themselves or with a wider cohort of users. These pastries will be aimed at 18-35 year olds, who are familiar with interaction with games. We want a game approach that both targets our core market of women, but can also draw in male consumers: sometimes they eat breakfast together, if they get lucky. For female customers we might link the gamification to weight for some customers and to social atractiveness: I would term this strategy "killing two birds with one scone". We should target non-breakfast eating users because targeting current cereal eaters may cannibalise our existing market. As you know we are weak in the fragmented ready-to-eat segment. We should also target the non-value-added fresh fruit market: the grapefruit segment. You might think we should target imaginative users of our exisitng products, but psychology research has shown it is very difficult to change the behavior of cereal adulterers.

The goals of gamifiysing breakfast therefore are:
* make breakfast fun to persuade non-eaters to hang around for it;
* provide feedback on progress towards goals;  
* provide a social network efffect to encourage users to enrol their friends. So, though it goes beyond today's question, I would individually QR code the packets and get users to scan the code in on smart phones when they use them, but also get their partners to scan the packets, the scans have to be within 10 mins of each other: feedback degrees of separation to other users and consumption in network..."

I am beginning to believe that my e-learning career has been a terrible loss to the world of global comestible marketing...