Our BEM

FRAMEWORK

Applying BEM to Events and Activations

BEM (Behavioral-Experiential-Meaningful) provides a new way to look at driving participation, engagement, and long-term behavior change. Based on human motivations and learning principles from games, BEM offers a systemic approach to creating sticky experiences that deliver business results.

Understanding Your Audience’s Motivations
The starting point of any BEM design is understanding your target audience’s core motivational drives. Consider the 7 motivational spectra – like mastery, discovery, and purpose – and map out what will intrinsically motivate your attendees. For corporate events, drives like relatedness, mastery, and empowerment often take priority. For marketing activations, discovery and pleasure may be more salient. Clarifying these motivational landscapes allows you to design activities tuned to what really matters to participants.

Crafting Feedback Systems That Captivate
Next, BEM focuses on crafting feedback systems, not simply rewards, to drive ongoing engagement. For corporate events, recognition, progress tracking, and social feedback hooks can strongly reinforce motivations. For marketing activations, sensory feedback, surprises, and gameplay feedback work well to spark ongoing attention and interest. The key is matching feedback types directly to core motivations to help participants feel a continual sense of anticipation and involvement.

Sustaining Engagement Through Loop Design
Habit-forming loops are the key to engagement over time in BEM. Consider crafting repeating action loops that create progression and habits. For corporate events, learning journeys, team challenges, and collaborative creation loops work well. For marketing activations, cycles of creativity, exploration, and visible progress tracking can get participants hooked. These loops make the desired behaviors stick beyond any one-off event.

Taking a Holistic Systems Approach
BEM operates best holistically, with all elements linking together into an interconnected system. Keep the big picture in mind, and map out how motivations, feedback, and loops interlink to drive behavioral change beyond the activation. This systemic thinking ensures your design has depth and sustains engagement over the long-term.

Conclusion
For corporate events and marketing activations that drive measurable impact, the BEM framework provides a new human-focused lens. Blending game design wisdom with motivation science allows you to craft experiences that captivate audiences well after the event concludes.