The impact of applying Gamification on brand equity of emerging sport brands

Today, the emergence of new brands and businesses is increasing rapidly. Every brand and business are trying to be known and influence people's minds (Image). In this regard, one of the important factors in the field of popularity and marketing is the brand/business identity. The brand/business identity increases the probability of choosing the brand by creating loyalty among customers and attracts many loyal customers. In this context, one of the ways to attract customers is to apply gamification process in which the features of the game are implemented in a non-game setting to attract more people. This research is applied in terms of purpose and semi-experimental in terms of data collection. In this study, the subjects were divided into two groups of 20 participant, test and control. Data Analysis was done by Covariance Analysis; The tool of data collection is the use of brand equity questionnaire by Kim et al. (2003) which was modified by Yoganakan et al. (2015). Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to determine the reliability of different sections, this coefficient was 0.86 for the total variables, which reveals the appropriate reliability of the research tool. The research statistical population includes emerging sports brands that have recently registered providing goods and services to their respective communities, and these brands were trying to influence the public's mind, and two of these emerging brands were selected as available samples. The results show that there is no significant difference between the adjusted averages of brand equity scores according to the membership of the "proof and test" group in the post-test stage (P>0.05).  Therefore, it is concluded that the main hypothesis of the research is rejected and the use of gamification does not affect the brand identity of emerging sports business. The practical significance of this effect was obtained (0.30). Other research hypotheses were also rejected after checking their significance level. The results present that the use of gamification does not affect equity of emerging sports brands, and betters for emerging brands not deploying gamification at the starting point due to the people lesser trust around accuracy of rewards, premiums and lotteries.