The Marketing Impacts Of Social Network Functionalities Integrated In Mobile Games

Mobile gaming is a new, profitable and fast-growing industry in which brand awarenessis a key success factor. However, with over one million total apps available, and hundredsmore each day, most new apps and games run a very high risk of going unnoticed. With thatin mind, managers of the mobile gaming industry must find ways to increase the level ofbrand awareness of their products. Since social media is known to be a way to generate brandawareness through electronic word-of-mouth, one possible solution proposed in this thesis isthe integration of social network functionalities (SNFs) within mobile games. Indeed, frominviting friends to sharing high scores on Facebook, more and more SNFs are gettingintegrated into today’s mobile games.First, through a review of the fundamental principles of brands and brand awareness aswell as a review of the theories regarding word-of-mouth (WOM) and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), this thesis seeks to list out the benefits that SNFs can bring for mobile gamecompanies. Notably, it suggests that SNFs can increase user adoption by raising awarenessand helping potential customers discover games via different forms of word-of-mouthmarketing. Then, in order to see how those theories are put into practice by top mobile gamecompanies, an exploratory research was conducted during which138top grossing mobilegames were tested with the objective of finding current trends in the integration of SNFs. Keyfindings of that exploratory research include the integration of multiple social platformswithin a same game, the extensive use of rewards in order to encourage the use of SNFs, aswell as the prevalence of Facebook and invitation mechanisms. Finally, through anexperiment conducted via a word game that integrated such invitation mechanism, the thesisshowed that eWOM from SNFs can significantly increase the brand awareness of mobilegames at the brand recognition level. Furthermore, the experiment showed that perceivedexpertise is a key factor that can significantly affect the effectiveness of eWOM from SNFs atgenerating awareness for mobile game titles.