Every loyalty programme runs into the same wall: not information, but engagement. You can build the app, print the points, send the newsletter — and still watch people not come back. The consumer-gaming world solved attention two decades ago. So we borrowed its best-proven mechanic and pointed it at a brand.
For the Swiss retailer Migros, we built a candy-crush-style match-3 game — the same swap-and-match loop that has kept hundreds of millions of people tapping — with the brand woven into the board, the characters and the rewards. The result is the thing loyalty programmes almost never achieve: people played it, and kept playing.
Engagement you can measure in habits
The campaign reached roughly 5% of the Swiss population, who played on average four times a day in sessions lasting around 14 minutes. Those aren’t vanity numbers — they’re habit numbers. Four sessions a day is a brand living in someone’s spare minutes, not a banner they scroll past once.
That daily dwell time is the platform. Around the core loop we built the systems that turn attention into a relationship:
- Tell a Friend — players invite friends for in-game rewards, so reach grows through personal recommendation, not paid media.
- Leaderboards — competition around gameplay and around promotions, events and actions, lifting the engagement rate through a bit of rivalry.
- Loyalty & stickiness — points collected in play, redeemed for exclusive rewards, so the habit compounds into long-term loyalty.
- Physical ↔ digital — serialised QR codes on packs pull the shopper from the shelf into the game, joining the in-store and on-phone experience into one journey.
The quiet prize is the data
A game people play four times a day is also the most consented, first-party data channel a retailer can own. Long dwell time and repeat play generate a rich, permissioned picture of real customers — feeding data lakes and AI/ML analytics that make every next campaign sharper. No third-party cookies, no rented audience: engagement the brand actually owns.
Everything sits on the guardrails a serious institution needs — consented first-party data, accessibility, Swiss hosting and no dark patterns. Engagement is a solved problem; the trick is solving it inside the rules a brand has to operate under.
Your customers will not read another leaflet. They might, however, play.