Gamification

The other day, I read an article on the idea of gamification and its affect on the business and marketing world. Gamification is defined as "the process of applying the psychological and sociological factors that drive intense game play to consumer measurement, enables us to understand the thought process behind consumers' willingness to participate in and comply with consumer behavior and attitude measurement tasks." Basically this means that they have figured out some way of a measurement of consumer behavior and their willingness to fall in line with general customer behavior. I have seen other publications in the same category of consumer behavior. The overall topic is rather hard for me to understand based on the definition but I think I understand it and can connect it to other things I've seen.

The main connection that I made was of a video I saw in which a normal person, as a test subject, was put in a room full of actors. Then a question was asked with a very easy, obvious answer. All of the actors would answer a single but wrong answer and the normal person would eventually fall into line with the rest of the actors and also answer the wrong answer even if it was obviously wrong. I connect this because I think this article is talking about consumers behavior of complying with the common action even if their opinion is more correct.

How does someone in the marketing department become individual in their own style and ideas, rather than complying and taking the easy way out of doing what everyone else does?