Jahez’s story is that of the new kid on the block that quickly becomes number 1 by focusing on the quality of its service. When we saw this online delivery platform acquire more and more loyalty and equity in such a short span of time, we decided that Jahez would not be the kind of company that grows its sales through advertising. It was meant to hook people and have them keep on choosing to come back to it.
We knew the best way to achieve this goal was to create more loyalty through marketing gamification. And when we approached Jahez with our idea, we were happy to find that we were, yet again, on the same wavelength, which led us to start thinking of a game.
From experience, we don’t believe in short-lived advergames and know that the true essence of marketing gamification is retention and loyalty. As such, our game had to have a real purpose combined with real incentives and to achieve a high return on investment. Our objectives were to increase app downloads and daily app usage, which would in turn lead to both more delivery orders and increased loyalty.
Alongside our client, we created a game that has all the ingredients to be addictive, with features set to incentivize daily usage. We designed and developed it with a local mindset, keeping the Saudi culture in mind by choosing a local hero, characters, tone of voice and street names. The project execution was purely handled by our local Saudi team. The game was built as part of the app and can only be played while the user waits for their delivery. As soon as the order arrives, the game is interrupted.
Most importantly, we developed features that allow to cross-sell between delivery orders, game play and customer rewards. The latter was achieved by creating a digital currency (called Jahez currency) which links the points collected while playing to the wallet inside the app. These points can be used to buy new features in the game, accessorize their characters or even buy new characters. At the same time, these points can be used to get discounts on delivery orders, groceries and other perks. As a cherry on top, restaurants and retailers listed inside the app were given the opportunity to cross promote their offers using said features, by offering free coins as part of the game for instance.
The game quickly went viral and retained a huge number of followers that came back to it on a daily basis, thus increasing the app’s usage and downloads, keeping it number 1 on the app store for 4 consecutive weeks.
Sponsorships and advertising budgets from the featured restaurants doubled and we estimate the brand awareness and loyalty to keep on increasing as we add new app features and levels every quarter.