Masai Clothing Company, an international fashion brand from Copenhagen, is known for its design for women who prefer a timeless, feminine, and personal style. 

They were looking for a way to generate more leads, while simultaneously collecting zero-party consumer data. Zero-party data is information a customer proactively shares with a brand like clothing preference or how they like something to fit. This valuable information can help Masai with both product development and retail coordination. 

Today the clothing brand is sold in 25 countries, with each country having different preferences for the shape and design of the clothing. Knowing the preferences of their customers is paramount for the brand – but to gather this information they needed to connect to their customers in a meaningful way. 

About the campaign

Masai ran a personality test in multiple countries, where respondents answered questions about clothing fit, preferred shape and style, and what respondents dressed to accentuate or accommodate. Based on this, respondents received information about their “shape”, which included general guidelines on what type of clothes best match your responses about body type. The test also included questions about color and pattern preferences that would also help determine the best match for you. 

The responses helped Masai in three ways: the data enabled them to make informed decisions about retail and wholesale planning; insights into customer preferences, purchase intentions, and body types ensured a data-driven design and product development process; and lastly, the data aided in retail and wholesale coordination. 

Masai saw truly incredible results. Most importantly, their customers loved the game! Over 160,000 people participated across the markets Masai operates in, which led to 60,000 new permissions. The results from the personality test provided Masai with a valuable dataset with a distribution of body types as well as color and outfit preferences. 

Masai was able to base all future decisions on this empirical evidence. They got direct statements from 160,000 respondents stating exactly what shapes and colors they prefer. This can be utilized in product development to make the most desirable colors and shapes for their customers. 

Since the campaign was run in multiple countries, the products can be coordinated for retail and wholesale planning to fit the preferences of each individual country. They were able to allocate the right amount of colors and shapes to the locations that customers will be shopping.

“Game mechanics give us a way to listen to our customers’ preferences and use that information to direct products to the markets that they’ll perform best in. Gamification campaigns have also lowered our CPL and reduced a new customer’s first time to purchase. In addition to all of this, the data we gathered also enabled me to write a brief to our organization about what our audience wants from Masai.”

– Maria Stigsnæs-Eriksen, Head of E-Commerce Sales & Campaigns at Masai

Why Playable works for Masai

The E-commerce team at Masai uses gamification to get the results they want at a lower cost-per-lead (CPL). Compared to the previous year’s campaign without gamification, the CPL with gamification was 50% less. 

Because of gamification, Masai was able to lower the time to purchase substantially. With this year’s gamified campaign, there was an average of only 7 days before a purchase was made. That— four months to just one week—is a very significant decrease in the amount of time a customer waited to purchase from Masai. 

They have gained so much valuable information from this campaign that Maria Stigsnæs-Eriksen, Online Sales Manager at Masai, wrote a 20-page brief to the organization for them to use in their daily work, with suggestions to improvements to their clothing based on these findings. These insights are now actively used to ensure a data-driven design process. Gamification was a tool that Masai used to create real business results. 

Takeaways

1. Informed decision-making

No more guesswork is needed. Through the use of game mechanics to gather insights on your audience, business decisions can be data-driven. For example, geographic preferences can be used in retail and wholesale planning and design decisions can be made based on customers own preferences. 

2. Zero-party data is gold! 

For a brand like Masai that creates products that have so much to do with personal preferences, getting information that’s proactively shared by customers is invaluable. Gamification provides a channel for customers to share this information that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible. Consumers are directly telling the brand exactly what they want. And most importantly, Masai is listening and using those insights to create more of what their audience wants. 

3. Consider the game concepts

What will your target demographic respond to most? How can a brand get the most out of their customers’ time? The target audience for Masai responded very well to a personality test, which proved to be a very familiar and fun format for them. In addition, respondents were able to learn something about themselves once they found out their results in the test. This shows the importance of finding the right game type for your target audience.