Gamification Vaillant escape game

Solutions in the fight against the climate crisis: our customer Vaillant offers many of them. But how do you make sure these solutions find their way to customers?
We believe it’s by taking the fear out of these new products, giving our participants the opportunity to play with the new features and see the added value, and at the same time using clever storytelling to stimulate the sales pitch.

The solution:

Turn the product into an escape game. Participants use the product to solve small, sequential puzzles to complete their personal mission to save the climate. A product experience that generates a lot of AAAHs, WOWs and YEAHs.

“The escape game was almost more fun than winning the main prize:”

Our task

More speed for climate protection: Vaillant is calling on its dealers to take part in the "Race for Climate".
Dealers and installers come together at several locations throughout Germany to playfully familiarise themselves with new products and services. Participants collect points in a friendly competition and are rewarded with active prizes.

Our task was to design the content and didactic concept and implement the gamification elements: a hybrid product experience with added value.

Our aim

The target group actively engages with the features of the new product, understands its added value and loses its reluctance to offer it to customers.

Our strategy

We combine intelligent storytelling with an innovative game strategy: not only do we create compelling product experiences, but we also raise awareness of the need to change our own behaviour.

The result

The product (heat pump) as an analogue playing field - solving puzzles that require the installer to really get to grips with the product. By actually dealing with the product, we reduce respect for a (supposedly) difficult installation.

An app combines the game experience with additional product information and facts about climate change.

Real product knowledge

The Vaillant Escape Game is not primarily about scoring points. It is important to us that the product and the understanding of it are at the centre. Participants touch the air/water heat pump, take it apart and experience new product features. How do we achieve this?

Well, for example, like this:
Participants receive an encrypted voice message telling them about the melting of the polar ice caps, which urgently needs to be slowed down. The trick is that if they play the message at half speed, it becomes intelligible and contains many clues.
To decipher the clues, learners must open the air/water heat pump. Inside, there are ice cubes hidden in strategic places.
The solution word for this first part of the escape game can be found in these ice cubes.

What do we achieve?
The participants take a first look inside the product.
Hiding the ice cubes draws attention to technical innovations and innovative solutions.

Less complexity - more impact

The new Vaillant air/water heat pump includes digital features and services that make life easier for installers. Unfamiliarity with digital solutions creates not only a natural barrier, but above all uncertainty and fear. We are addressing this fear by extending our ‘playing field’ with an iOS app. This app is used to set tasks, contains further information - and is easy to use. It is programmed to avoid wrong clicks and is easy for anyone to use.

By reducing complexity, we also take away participants’ fear of digital. Less complexity - more impact.

Storytelling leads to behaviour change

A learning experience should always lead to a change in the behaviour of participants.
In our case, the active placement of the innovative air/water heat pump in sales conversations with end users.

By approaching the product in a playful and simple way, we were able to allay fears of excessive complexity. At the same time, we developed a communicative framework for the escape game that makes people aware of the importance and urgency of more sustainable energy systems: As agents, participants save our planet by playing their way through the escape game. All puzzles are directly related to immediate challenges (air pollution, melting polar ice caps, heat waves and droughts, etc.) - without any finger wagging.