Majesco Entertainment Company recently released a game for the Wii, featuring home improvement retailer The Home Depot. The game, "Our House: Party!" features 175 mini-games in which players (up to four) complete home improvement projects in order to make their homes the best in the neighborhood. These projects include tasks like construction, demolition, plumbing, wiring, landscaping, decorating, and, of course, racing through The Home Depot store to get the necessary power tools.
Majesco also released a similar version of the game - "Our House" - for Nintendo DS. In the DS version, players start as contractors who must build customer's houses in order to save up enough money to build their own home.
The first brilliant thing about these games is that they're just plain fun. (Or at least they sound fun! I haven't tested them out yet.) The second brilliant thing is that, in the midst of all that fun, Majesco and The Home Depot have combined education (learn, loosely, how to do various projects), branding (The Home Depot, of course!), and entertainment. The game provides instruction and fun in a positive brand experience for The Home Depot's potential customers.
The Home Depot creates other positive brand experiences, too, without forcing customers to pay them a dime. In addition to the caricatured "do-it-yourself" projects of the "Our House" and "Our House: Party!" games, The Home Depot shares scores of free, real-life "how to" videos on their YouTube channel. And, as I understand, anyone can visit a Home Depot store during their project workshops for hands-on instruction in home improvement.
These are the kinds of things that attract customers to a brand. Give people something useful, teach them, provide them a service - for free. In the process you will be building trust, building rapport, and building relationships with people. And then, when those people really do need a product that you sell, with whom will they prefer to spend their money? You've proven yourself trustworthy in a service that does not earn you money; now those people will be ready to trust you with a service that does.
How can your organization provide an honest-to-goodness, helpful, positive, fun brand experience for people, before they ever have to spend a dime?
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