Doom is the OG of immersive video games. In 1993, Doom essentially created the genre, and almost 30 years, 20 releases and more than 10,000,000 sales later, the franchise is still considered by many to be the best of all times.
A big part of what makes Doom so popular is that it delivers “flow”– defined by psychologists as a “mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment of the process of the activity.”
But what does that have to do with marketing?
I’d argue that
- The marketing equivalent of flow is the age-old “right message delivered at the right time to the right person via the right channel” — marketing so relevant and seamless it feels like a service instead of an intrusion.
- The keys to achieving flow-state marketing, just might be found in video games
First-person Perspective
In immersive games like Doom, the player is the protagonist. Everything that happens, unfolds through their eyes, their perspective.
Translation – The best marketing is no longer product centric or channel specific. It’s customer centric and experience driven. Stop selling and instead think about what your customer is trying to do and how you can help them meet that need.
Choice
In Doom, a player has infinite choices, but they are presented in a way that fits the specific situation and moment in time.
Translation –The best personalization is real-time, contextual and individual. It reflects everything you know about your customer combined with what they are doing now, in channel.
Control
When you play Doom the action isn’t just happening to you, you are driving the action. And you live or die based on the decisions you make…
Translation – In a world of GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and IOS 15, customers control their data. They are only going to allow you to collect it if they trust how you will use it. Don’t spam them or overload them or ignore their explicit preferences. Show them you know them.
Automation
Thousands and thousands of hours go into developing a game like Doom. The action may feel effortless, but it’s being driven by lines of code — programming and business rules and machine learning algorithms.
Translation – You can’t deliver a seamless, relevant, omnichannel experience if you are stitching together campaigns across channels, tossing data across platforms and analyzing responses across silos. You need automation and integration and ideally, an element of self-learning/optimization.
The Journey
We are not talking Pong or PacMan, where your final score was probably the best determinant of enjoyment. When you play Doom you are immersed in a story that progresses over time and you are an active participant in the action that propels that story forward.
Translation – Marketing today needs to be about conversations, not campaigns. We’ve been mapping customer journeys for years, but now it’s time to actually operationalize those journeys.
We may be the OG of marketing platforms, but with the new release of v12.1.1, our solutions for real-time personalization, journey orchestration and campaign optimization are helping modern marketing organizations across the world universe 
slay today’s monster challenges
… just like Doom
.
If you’re ready to achieve flow-state marketing, Unica is here to help.
