As World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary, Luke Aldridge examines what the enduring of the popularity multiplayer fantasy game can teach us about community engagement
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a staple of the gaming world. Players have been traversing Azeroth as their character of choice, clubbing together to try and help their faction – be it Alliance or Horde – win the battle for two decades now. As the franchise celebrates its 20th anniversary, there’s still no shortage of players, with the game attracting around 5m subscribers a year.
In 2004, WoW’s arrival on the market didn’t just create an incredibly popular and colourful role-playing game. It spawned a movement that redefined how people connect online.
Its user-formed communities enabled players to socialise, quest, raid and engage in player-vs-player activities. Four years before the massive explosion in popularity around Facebook, the game was giving people a taste of online social networks. WoW was a social network before social media.
Fast forward to today, and WoW’s influence is still evident in how we think about community, fandom and digital interaction. As businesses struggle to build meaningful connections in the fast-evolving digital world, there are some tangible lessons WoW’s legacy can teach us about building engaged communities and lasting customer and brand loyalty.
Lesson 1: Connection
Firstly, give people a way to connect with likeminded people. WoW’s popularity was spurred by the ability for players to connect on online servers through local area networks (LANs). Through these connections, they formed guilds with defined social structures, including leaders, officers, members and customisable ranks, giving everyone a way to contribute. Gamers chatted with other Guild members, set objectives and tasks to work towards for a shared sense of achievement within their custom-built online community.
Many Guilds started 20 years ago are still battle-ready today, demonstrating the strength of the engagement this approach helped foster. And that’s exactly what businesses should set as their goal for engaging with their customers.
Platforms like Discord or functions within your website or forum are places where you can listen to audience needs, respond to issues in real-time and create that sense of connection. Think platform and customer first, making every connection with and around your business a victory worth celebrating.
Lesson 2: Engaging with feedback
However, enabling engagement is only the first pull on this raid. You need to understand how to listen to your audience and make the most of its feedback. Having dedicated customer service representatives on online platforms can create a faster feedback loop between your customers and business, the same way guild leaders keep their band of warriors in check.
Demonstrate how much impact the community has on product development and help customers feel like they’re part of the problem-solving, working together on a quest to get the most out of a product. This could be particularly relevant for ‘picks and shovels’ businesses providing tools for everyday customer use, such as software companies.
But to get actionable and recurring feedback, you must reward engagement and interest. Take inspiration from the ranks of WoW Guilds to gamify customer loyalty programmes, using different levels to help champion progress and foster this sense of achievement within a business context.
Allowing people to rise through the ranks based on social media engagement or purchases can motivate a sense of loyalty and onboard them to a product ecosystem, ultimately turning them into paying committed customers. This is something language learning apps have taken onboard, capitalising on flexibility and personalisation to avoid overwhelm or customer boredom.
Lesson 3: Conquer new territories
Finally, think beyond your realm. Could you open up new worlds for your existing customers – and bring new ones along for the journey – through strategic partnerships?
WoW’s strong IP, with multiple spin-offs such as Hearthstone and Warcraft Rumble, has enabled it to refresh and reinvent its offering. Exploring different media, as seen with the 2016 Warcraft film, has brought the game in front of new audiences in new formats. Less official concepts like memes have helped it remain relevant, with content like the infamous Leeroy Jenkins video, which quickly went viral.
While most businesses don’t have the IP that popular entertainment franchises do, you can borrow cultural equity through brand partnerships. Look at Greggs, for example. It refuses to be limited by the constraints of the baked goods sector, turning up in surprising places, tapping into Primark shoppers through a clothing line and courting gamers with its special gift boxes to celebrate the launch of the PS5.
The many faces of WoW fandom prove that you don’t need to be limited to your realm. Plan genuine partnerships that stay true to the essence of your business, while expanding it into new media and markets. Your community might be bigger than you think.
WoW might’ve started as a game, but it grew into so much more – thanks to continuous investment in enabling and nurturing its community of fans. And that’s a lesson every business should take if they want to level up, earn epic loot in the form of customer loyalty, and build Guilds of supporters that span generations.
Luke Aldridge is gaming strategy director for play at Essence Mediacom