🍴Fork Play!🍴Gamification as a marketing tool to reduce client indecision in catering
Fiona van Iersel
MSc Marketing — King's College London
Module: Digital Marketing (7QQMO512X)
Date: 16 September 2025
https://keats.kcl.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=768345

🍴Fork Play!🍴Gamification as a marketing tool to reduce client indecision in catering
Submitted: 16 September 2025 7:15 PM

My friend Sophia runs a catering company that I love to help cook at, and I swear the hardest part of her job isn’t cooking but dragging clients out of menu indecision. They’ll say, “Oh, something light and fun,” which could mean literally anything from sushi boats to deep-fried Mars Bars. To solve this, I’d love to gamify the process with a Build-a-Meal app. Basically food Minecraft but for weddings and corporate parties.

Behaviour : customers procrastinating and endlessly second-guessing food choices. Or not knowing what they want or the options.

Gamification proposal: The app works like a painter’s palette where clients drag-and-drop dishes to design their event. Each choice shows:

Budget impact (champagne towers vs. prosecco-on-a-budget).

Dietary coverage (no vegans gluten gluten-freeers or pescaterians left starving).

Plate visuals (so you can see how fancy your vol-au-vents actually look).

Seasonal availability (pumpkin soup in July? The app says: “Ummmm...try again”).

Course flow (three desserts and no mains = simulated adult guest mutiny yet happy kids hahahah).

Virtual “guests” even react, choose only kale salad, and watch your animated partygoers sneak off for kebabs. LOL

From a marketing perspective, this reduces choice overload (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000) and decision fatigue by turning serious choices into playful experimentation... make people laugh thought these stressful decisions. Its choice architecture and make for active involvement (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), fostering co-creation by letting clients design their own menu (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), and creates brand stickiness through gamified interaction, you may even make a meal just for fun(Hamari, Koivisto & Sarsa, 2014; Werbach & Hunter, 2015). Instead of being “just a caterer,” Sophia becomes the host of a game where the prize is a perfect event meal.

SOoooon the Build-a-Meal app takes client indecision and turns it into fun, guided play. Less endless emailing phone calls and back an forths, more delighted customers! I really want to make this and play it now! So if our reading this and know how to make apps give me a call, let's do it!



References

Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014). Does gamification work? — A literature review of empirical studies on gamification. Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 3025–3034.

Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.

Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation experiences: The next practice in value creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5–14.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.

Werbach, K., & Hunter, D. (2015). The gamification toolkit: Dynamics, mechanics, and components for the win. Wharton Digital Press.