The role of user participation and psychological distance in consumer brand attitudes in gamified marketing

Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 2;15(1):582. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-84268-5.

Abstract

With the rapid development of the digital age, in the business field, gamified marketing has been applied to practice by more and more enterprises, and has been studied by many scholars in the field of academic research. However, the existing research mainly focuses on the impact of gamification marketing activities itself on consumer behavior, and lacks the exploration of the design and mechanism of gamification marketing itself. The purpose of this paper is to find out the influence factors of gamification marketing language style on consumers' brand attitudes, and the empirical results have important theoretical significance and practical implication. In the context of gamification marketing strategy design, consumers' brand attitudes are measured through situational experiments, and psychological distance is introduced as a moderating variable to explore the boundary conditions. The results show that gamified marketing language styles (ludus and paida) have an impact on consumer brand attitudes by influencing consumer user participation. Meanwhile, consumers' psychological distance moderates the impact of gamified marketing language styles on consumer user participation.

Keywords: Brand attitude; Construal level theory; Gamified marketing; Psychological distance; Self-determination theory; User participation.