Watch Trailer
77k+
downloads
during 2024 cycle*
15%
in-store QR engagement vs
2% benchmark
4M+
WildBucks
generated
251,000+
unique, trackable
sessions
Wild Space
A gaming-universe ambition, built for a loyalty platform.
.
Role: Product & Behavioural Strategy Lead (Experience & Growth)
Focus: Behavioural adoption, audience architecture, reward logic, UX, CRM and partner propositions
I turned a branded loyalty brief with Pokémon-sized ambition into a brand world and behaviour system built to make people scan, play, earn, collect and return.
Snapshot
RCL Foods wanted Wild Space to have the pull of Pokémon and Roblox. The reality was less glamorous, and more interesting: it was a rewards and loyalty platform that had to make people scan, play, collect and return during everyday grocery behaviour.
My role was to turn that ambition into a behaviour-led platform strategy: one that made participation feel worth starting, rewarding enough to continue and useful enough for brands and retailers to build inside.
Brief: Wild Space Brand Strategy
Brand: RCL Foods
Product: gamified, third-party loyalty and rewards platform for RCL Foods’ brands to activate on.
Competitors to look at: Pokémon and Roblox
Primary audience: gamers
Use case: In-store participation and at-home gaming
Context
This was one of those briefs you read twice.
RCL Foods wanted Wild Space to behave like a gaming universe, but it also had to work as a South African rewards platform for shoppers, brands and retailers. The brief was not simply to make loyalty feel fun. It was to give a marketing-led platform enough identity, utility and repeat value to stand on its own.
Tension(s)
From a brand development perspective, the challenge was immediately apparent: how do you create a brand that is undeniably Wild Space while still giving enough creative freedom to the brands activating within it?
... And appeal to a Gamer audience. Aspiration: trillion dollar universe. I was intrigued.
Then the real kicker comes in a meeting further along the week.
We are not just asking people to play on this platform at home.
They need to engage with the app whilst in-store.
This was not a matter of fandom building. It was a conscious, physical behaviour - scanning.
That changed everything.
Before anyone could become a player, collector or repeat user, they had to take out their phone in-store and engage with a branded platform while probably just trying to buy pasta and leave.
Wild Space needed the gravity of a game world, but its entry point was a small, awkward shopper action that had to earn attention immediately.
My view was that the ambition was reachable, but only if the experience matched the brand.
So, I went back to the client to request that the brief be extended into a Brand and Experience Strategy.
My reasoning was simple: with such diverse audience needs, the intelligent collection and use of data would be essential to delivering the level of personalisation required across the ecosystem. But before any of that could happen, the platform first had to earn the right to participate in a shopper's journey.
The challenge was not simply building a brand or a loyalty programme.
It was designing a platform capable of balancing commercial flexibility, behavioural psychology and audience desire from the very first scan.
That created the central tension:
Wild Space had to feel open enough for brands and retailers to activate inside it, but strong enough to remain undeniably Wild Space. Too much brand freedom and it would become a messy campaign cupboard. Too much platform control and it would be difficult for partners to use.
To achieve the scale of ambition being discussed, the platform could not rely on novelty alone. It needed to be:
strategically addictive, with enough personalisation to make each audience feel the experience was built for them.
The Exchange Behind the Ecosystem
WILD SPACE
Turns participation into data, value and return
USERS
Participate
BRANDS
Create reasons to participate
RETAILERS
Give participation a place to happen
At the same time, the platform had to appeal to a remarkably diverse set of audiences.
At the same time, the platform had to appeal to a remarkably diverse set of audiences.
Kids wanted play and collectability.
Gamers wanted challenge, progression and status.
Parents wanted safety and value.
Brands wanted engagement and data.
Retailers wanted shopper action and measurable outcomes.
Positioning
That meant the positioning had to do more than make Wild Space sound exciting. It had to solve the tension between audience desire, partner flexibility and platform coherence.
If Wild Space was going to earn attention, data and repeat participation, it needed a role people could understand immediately, and a world brands could build inside without breaking it.
The gaming references helped define the principles.
Roblox showed the power of community, contribution and user participation.
Pokémon Go showed how digital play could spill into the physical world. Pokémon and Funko showed the emotional pull of collecting.
Together, these examples highlighted the importance of creating an experience that could evolve over time, reward participation and give people reasons to keep coming back.
But Wild Space was not trying to become a global gaming franchise overnight. It had to translate those principles into a South African rewards ecosystem rooted in local culture, everyday shopping behaviour, brand participation and real-world value.
Platform
Wild Space as South Africa’s digital playground — where gaming, rewards, culture and brand stories meet.
Brand Blueprint
The purpose was to enrich lives through play, making digital interaction rewarding and fun.
The essence was connecting worlds, crafting stories and creating value.
The mission was to create a playful, rewarding digital universe where people could connect, explore and grow.
The values were not there to decorate a strategy slide and mind their business in the corner. They became rules for how the platform should behave.
- Innovation gave Wild Space permission to experiment with AR, digital missions, collectables and evolving mechanics.
- Community gave people a reason to participate beyond the transaction.
- Integrity made safety, transparency and parental confidence non-negotiable.
- Inclusivity rooted the platform in South Africa’s diversity.
- Creativity gave brands, users and the platform room to build.
Together, they protected the balance Wild Space needed: enough flexibility for partners to create inside the world, and enough consistency for users to recognise what kind of world they were entering.
Strategic Proposition:
Every interaction unlocks new discoveries.
This gave each audience a clear reason to participate without forcing the platform to become different things for different people.
For gamers, discovery meant challenges, status and rewards.
For shoppers, it meant extra value from everyday purchases.
For children, it meant safe play, characters and achievement.
For brands, it meant turning products into stories, missions and rewards.
For retailers, it meant making the store environment more participatory.
Giving Wild Space a clear strategic role:
Connect digital actions to real-world value in a way users wanted to repeat and partners could keep building on.
Strategic System
From there, the ecosystem had to be designed for growth, not just launch.
First Outpost could be the starting point, but Wild Space needed a structure that could hold more games, rewards, characters, collectables, brand stories, retail triggers and CRM moments over time without becoming a pile of disconnected features.
So I built the strategy around a repeatable participation loop, which gave Wild Space a simple behavioural architecture: every interaction had to move people from entry into engagement, from engagement into visible value, and from value into a reason to come back.
The loop gave Wild Space a simple behavioural architecture: every interaction had to move people from entry into engagement, from engagement into visible value, and from value into a reason to come back.
It turned a one-off scan into cumulative progress.
It also created the data logic.
Each interaction could reveal what someone played, collected, completed, ignored or returned for, allowing Wild Space to move from generic reward mechanics to more intelligent personalisation across the ecosystem.
Most importantly, the loop became a decision filter.
Any future feature, brand activation or retail mechanic had to answer three questions:
- Does it make the first action easier?
- Does it make participation feel more rewarding?
- Does it give people a reason to return?
That is what kept the platform coherent. Wild Space could expand into new mechanics and partnerships, but every addition still had to serve the same behavioural system.
B2B and Retailer Logic
The same loop had to work commercially.
For brands, Wild Space became a plug-and-play gamification ecosystem: a way to launch products, tell stories, drive specific behaviours and measure engagement without building a standalone gaming platform from scratch.
For retailers, it offered a practical shopper proposition: store visits, dwell time, basket-building opportunities and engagement mechanics that could make the retail environment feel more progressive.
This made governance critical.
Wild Space needed to give partners enough freedom to create meaningful activations, but enough structure to keep every execution native to the world.
If every mission, character or reward felt like a thinly disguised advert, users would treat it like one. Gamers would not care. Shoppers would only use it for the discount. Children would lose interest. Retailers would struggle to justify the space.
The platform only worked if the exchange felt valuable on every side.
WILD SPACE
A repeatable participation platform
USERS
Value, progress, ownership∴ collectables, play, rewards
BRANDS
Low-barrier gamification, campaign value, 1PD
∴ missions, characters,data capture, product interaction
RETAILERS
Store traffic, dwell time, basket-building
∴ in-store participation,product discovery, innovation cue
A branded game world could not survive on novelty. Users needed reasons to participate. Brands needed reasons to invest. Retailers needed reasons to support it. The platform needed all three to keep feeding the loop.
So every activation had to work twice:
as marketing for the brand, and as progress for the user.
Brand stories had to become playable.Product interactions had to become missions.Rewards had to feel earned.Collectables had to create ownership.CRM had to point people back to something they wanted to complete.Retail participation had to feel like the beginning of the experience, not the admin before it.
Execution
The strategy shaped Wild Space as a world with rules, not a content lucky dip.
Product-linked scans became the doorway into the experience. Hyper-casual games made participation easy to start. WildBucks made the value exchange visible. Explorers and collectables gave users something to build and care about. Unlocks created a reason to keep going. CRM could then prompt return through incomplete collections, new drops, missions and rewards.
From there, the platform could scale through brand-specific quests, seasonal challenges, AR collectable hunts, physical rewards, community competitions, creator tools, live events, virtual goods, personalisation and a wider marketplace of digital and physical collectables.
But the work was never about throwing every possible feature into the universe and hoping something sparkled.
It was about defining what made each feature belong.
Impact
Wild Space drove:
4M+
WildBucks
generated
15%
in-store QR engagement vs
2% benchmark
251,000+
unique, trackable
sessions
77k+
downloads
during 2024 cycle*
Awards
2024 New Generation Awards
GOLD for Most Innovative App Developed by an Agency
GOLD for Best CRM Strategy Campaign
SILVER for Most Innovative Gamification Campaign
SILVER for Best Gaming Campaign — validating Wild Space as a brand world, experience system and repeat-participation platform.
The proof mattered because it showed the strategy had done more than decorate loyalty with play. It turned a grocery-linked rewards platform into a repeatable participation system for users, brands and retailers.
77k+
downloads
during 2024 cycle*
15%
in-store QR engagement vs
2% benchmark
4M+
WildBucks
generated
251,000+
unique, trackable
sessions
Wild Space
A gaming-universe ambition, built for a loyalty platform.
Role: Product & Behavioural Strategy Lead (Experience & Growth)
Focus: Behavioural adoption, audience architecture, reward logic, UX, CRM and partner propositions
I turned a branded loyalty brief with Pokémon-sized ambition into a brand world and behaviour system built to make people scan, play, earn, collect and return.
Snapshot
RCL Foods wanted Wild Space to have the pull of Pokémon and Roblox. The reality was less glamorous, and more interesting: it was a rewards and loyalty platform that had to make people scan, play, collect and return during everyday grocery behaviour.
My role was to turn that ambition into a behaviour-led platform strategy: one that made participation feel worth starting, rewarding enough to continue and useful enough for brands and retailers to build inside.
Brief: Wild Space Brand Strategy
Brand: RCL Foods
Product: gamified, third-party loyalty and rewards platform for RCL Foods’ brands to activate on.
Competitors to look at: Pokémon and Roblox
Primary audience: gamers
Use case: In-store participation and at-home gaming
Context
This was one of those briefs you read twice.
RCL Foods wanted Wild Space to behave like a gaming universe, but it also had to work as a South African rewards platform for shoppers, brands and retailers. The brief was not simply to make loyalty feel fun. It was to give a marketing-led platform enough identity, utility and repeat value to stand on its own.
Tension(s)
From a brand development perspective, the challenge was immediately apparent: how do you create a brand that is undeniably Wild Space while still giving enough creative freedom to the brands activating within it?
... And appeal to a Gamer audience. Aspiration: trillion dollar universe. I was intrigued.
Then the real kicker comes in a meeting further along the week.
We are not just asking people to play on this platform at home.
They need to engage with the app whilst in-store.
This was not a matter of fandom building. It was a conscious, physical behaviour - scanning.
That changed everything.
Before anyone could become a player, collector or repeat user, they had to take out their phone in-store and engage with a branded platform while probably just trying to buy pasta and leave.
Wild Space needed the gravity of a game world, but its entry point was a small, awkward shopper action that had to earn attention immediately.
My view was that the ambition was reachable, but only if the experience matched the brand.
So, I went back to the client to request that the brief be extended into a Brand and Experience Strategy.
My reasoning was simple: with such diverse audience needs, the intelligent collection and use of data would be essential to delivering the level of personalisation required across the ecosystem. But before any of that could happen, the platform first had to earn the right to participate in a shopper's journey.
The challenge was not simply building a brand or a loyalty programme.
It was designing a platform capable of balancing commercial flexibility, behavioural psychology and audience desire from the very first scan.
That created the central tension:
Wild Space had to feel open enough for brands and retailers to activate inside it, but strong enough to remain undeniably Wild Space. Too much brand freedom and it would become a messy campaign cupboard. Too much platform control and it would be difficult for partners to use.
To achieve the scale of ambition being discussed, the platform could not rely on novelty alone. It needed to be:
strategically addictive, with enough personalisation to make each audience feel the experience was built for them.
The Exchange Behind the Ecosystem
WILD SPACE
Turns participation into data, value and return
USERS
Participate
BRANDS
Create reasons to participate
RETAILERS
Give participation a place to happen
At the same time, the platform had to appeal to a remarkably diverse set of audiences.
Kids wanted play and collectability.
Gamers wanted challenge, progression and status.
Parents wanted safety and value.
Brands wanted engagement and data.
Retailers wanted shopper action and measurable outcomes.
Positioning
That meant the positioning had to do more than make Wild Space sound exciting. It had to solve the tension between audience desire, partner flexibility and platform coherence.
If Wild Space was going to earn attention, data and repeat participation, it needed a role people could understand immediately, and a world brands could build inside without breaking it.
The gaming references helped define the principles.
Roblox showed the power of community, contribution and user participation.
Pokémon Go showed how digital play could spill into the physical world. Pokémon and Funko showed the emotional pull of collecting.
Together, these examples highlighted the importance of creating an experience that could evolve over time, reward participation and give people reasons to keep coming back.
But Wild Space was not trying to become a global gaming franchise overnight. It had to translate those principles into a South African rewards ecosystem rooted in local culture, everyday shopping behaviour, brand participation and real-world value.
So the positioning moved from “another loyalty app” to a more ownable platform idea:
Platform
Wild Space as South Africa’s digital playground — where gaming, rewards, culture and brand stories meet.
Brand Blueprint
The purpose was to enrich lives through play, making digital interaction rewarding and fun.
The essence was connecting worlds, crafting stories and creating value.
The mission was to create a playful, rewarding digital universe where people could connect, explore and grow.
The values were not there to decorate a strategy slide and mind their business in the corner. They became rules for how the platform should behave.
- Innovation gave Wild Space permission to experiment with AR, digital missions, collectables and evolving mechanics.
- Community gave people a reason to participate beyond the transaction.
- Integrity made safety, transparency and parental confidence non-negotiable.
- Inclusivity rooted the platform in South Africa’s diversity.
- Creativity gave brands, users and the platform room to build.
Together, they protected the balance Wild Space needed: enough flexibility for partners to create inside the world, and enough consistency for users to recognise what kind of world they were entering.
Strategic Proposition:
Every interaction unlocks new discoveries.
This gave each audience a clear reason to participate without forcing the platform to become different things for different people.
For gamers, discovery meant challenges, status and rewards.
For shoppers, it meant extra value from everyday purchases.
For children, it meant safe play, characters and achievement.
For brands, it meant turning products into stories, missions and rewards.
For retailers, it meant making the store environment more participatory.
Giving Wild Space a clear strategic role:
Connect digital actions to real-world value in a way users wanted to repeat and partners could keep building on.
Strategic System
From there, the ecosystem had to be designed for growth, not just launch.
First Outpost could be the starting point, but Wild Space needed a structure that could hold more games, rewards, characters, collectables, brand stories, retail triggers and CRM moments over time without becoming a pile of disconnected features.
So I built the strategy around a repeatable participation loop, which gave Wild Space a simple behavioural architecture: every interaction had to move people from entry into engagement, from engagement into visible value, and from value into a reason to come back.
The loop gave Wild Space a simple behavioural architecture: every interaction had to move people from entry into engagement, from engagement into visible value, and from value into a reason to come back.
It turned a one-off scan into cumulative progress.
It also created the data logic.
Each interaction could reveal what someone played, collected, completed, ignored or returned for, allowing Wild Space to move from generic reward mechanics to more intelligent personalisation across the ecosystem.
Most importantly, the loop became a decision filter.
Any future feature, brand activation or retail mechanic had to answer three questions:
- Does it make the first action easier?
- Does it make participation feel more rewarding?
- Does it give people a reason to return?
That is what kept the platform coherent. Wild Space could expand into new mechanics and partnerships, but every addition still had to serve the same behavioural system.
B2B and Retailer Logic
The same loop had to work commercially.
For brands, Wild Space became a plug-and-play gamification ecosystem: a way to launch products, tell stories, drive specific behaviours and measure engagement without building a standalone gaming platform from scratch.
For retailers, it offered a practical shopper proposition: store visits, dwell time, basket-building opportunities and engagement mechanics that could make the retail environment feel more progressive.
This made governance critical.
Wild Space needed to give partners enough freedom to create meaningful activations, but enough structure to keep every execution native to the world. If every mission, character or reward felt like a thinly disguised advert, users would treat it like one. Gamers would not care. Shoppers would only use it for the discount. Children would lose interest. Retailers would struggle to justify the space.
The platform only worked if the exchange felt valuable on every side.
WILD SPACE
A repeatable participation platform
USERS
Value, progress, ownership∴ collectables, play, rewards
BRANDS
Low-barrier gamification, campaign value, 1PD
∴ missions, characters,data capture, product interaction
RETAILERS
Store traffic, dwell time, basket-building
∴ in-store participation,product discovery, innovation cue
A branded game world could not survive on novelty. Users needed reasons to participate. Brands needed reasons to invest. Retailers needed reasons to support it. The platform needed all three to keep feeding the loop.
So every activation had to work twice:
as marketing for the brand, and as progress for the user.
Brand stories had to become playable.Product interactions had to become missions.Rewards had to feel earned.Collectables had to create ownership.CRM had to point people back to something they wanted to complete.Retail participation had to feel like the beginning of the experience, not the admin before it.
Execution
The strategy shaped Wild Space as a world with rules, not a content lucky dip.
Product-linked scans became the doorway into the experience. Hyper-casual games made participation easy to start. WildBucks made the value exchange visible. Explorers and collectables gave users something to build and care about. Unlocks created a reason to keep going. CRM could prompt return through incomplete collections, new drops, missions and rewards.
The platform could then scale through brand-specific quests, seasonal challenges, AR collectable hunts, physical rewards, community competitions, creator tools, live events, virtual goods, personalisation and a broader marketplace of digital and physical collectables.
But the work was not about throwing every possible feature into the universe and hoping something sparkled.
It was about defining what made each feature belong.
Impact
Wild Space drove:
4M+
WildBucks
generated
15%
in-store QR engagement vs
2% benchmark
251,000+
unique, trackable
sessions
77k+
downloads
during 2024 cycle*
Awards
2024 New Generation Awards
GOLD for Most Innovative App Developed by an Agency
GOLD for Best CRM Strategy Campaign
SILVER for Most Innovative Gamification Campaign
SILVER for Best Gaming Campaign — validating Wild Space as a brand world, experience system and repeat-participation platform.
The proof mattered because it showed the strategy had done more than decorate loyalty with play. It turned a grocery-linked rewards platform into a repeatable participation system for users, brands and retailers.
77k+
downloads
during 2024 cycle*
15%
in-store QR engagement vs
2% benchmark
4M+
WildBucks
generated
251,000+
unique, trackable
sessions
Wild Space
A gaming-universe ambition, built for a loyalty platform.
.
Role: Product & Behavioural Strategy Lead (Experience & Growth)
Focus: Behavioural adoption, audience architecture, reward logic, UX, CRM and partner propositions
I turned a branded loyalty brief with Pokémon-sized ambition into a brand world and behaviour system built to make people scan, play, earn, collect and return.
Snapshot
RCL Foods wanted Wild Space to have the pull of Pokémon and Roblox. The reality was less glamorous, and more interesting: it was a rewards and loyalty platform that had to make people scan, play, collect and return during everyday grocery behaviour.
My role was to turn that ambition into a behaviour-led platform strategy: one that made participation feel worth starting, rewarding enough to continue and useful enough for brands and retailers to build inside.
Brief: Wild Space Brand Strategy
Brand: RCL Foods
Product: gamified, third-party loyalty and rewards platform for RCL Foods’ brands to activate on.
Competitors to look at: Pokémon and Roblox
Primary audience: gamers
Use case: In-store participation and at-home gaming
Context
This was one of those briefs you read twice.
RCL Foods wanted Wild Space to behave like a gaming universe, but it also had to work as a South African rewards platform for shoppers, brands and retailers. The brief was not simply to make loyalty feel fun. It was to give a marketing-led platform enough identity, utility and repeat value to stand on its own.
Tension(s)
From a brand development perspective, the challenge was immediately apparent: how do you create a brand that is undeniably Wild Space while still giving enough creative freedom to the brands activating within it?
... And appeal to a Gamer audience. Aspiration: trillion dollar universe. I was intrigued.
Then the real kicker comes in a meeting further along the week.
We are not just asking people to play on this platform at home.
They need to engage with the app whilst in-store.
This was not a matter of fandom building. It was a conscious, physical behaviour - scanning.
That changed everything.
Before anyone could become a player, collector or repeat user, they had to take out their phone in-store and engage with a branded platform while probably just trying to buy pasta and leave.
Wild Space needed the gravity of a game world, but its entry point was a small, awkward shopper action that had to earn attention immediately.
My view was that the ambition was reachable, but only if the experience matched the brand.
So, I went back to the client to request that the brief be extended into a Brand and Experience Strategy.
My reasoning was simple: with such diverse audience needs, the intelligent collection and use of data would be essential to delivering the level of personalisation required across the ecosystem. But before any of that could happen, the platform first had to earn the right to participate in a shopper's journey.
The challenge was not simply building a brand or a loyalty programme.
It was designing a platform capable of balancing commercial flexibility, behavioural psychology and audience desire from the very first scan.
That created the central tension:
Wild Space had to feel open enough for brands and retailers to activate inside it, but strong enough to remain undeniably Wild Space. Too much brand freedom and it would become a messy campaign cupboard. Too much platform control and it would be difficult for partners to use.
To achieve the scale of ambition being discussed, the platform could not rely on novelty alone. It needed to be:
strategically addictive, with enough personalisation to make each audience feel the experience was built for them.
The Exchange Behind the Ecosystem
WILD SPACE
Turns participation into data, value and return
USERS
Participate
BRANDS
Create reasons to participate
RETAILERS
Give participation a place to happen
At the same time, the platform had to appeal to a remarkably diverse set of audiences.
Kids wanted play and collectability.
Gamers wanted challenge, progression and status.
Parents wanted safety and value.
Brands wanted engagement and data.
Retailers wanted shopper action and measurable outcomes.
Positioning
That meant the positioning had to do more than make Wild Space sound exciting. It had to solve the tension between audience desire, partner flexibility and platform coherence.
If Wild Space was going to earn attention, data and repeat participation, it needed a role people could understand immediately, and a world brands could build inside without breaking it.
The gaming references helped define the principles.
Roblox showed the power of community, contribution and user participation.
Pokémon Go showed how digital play could spill into the physical world. Pokémon and Funko showed the emotional pull of collecting.
Together, these examples highlighted the importance of creating an experience that could evolve over time, reward participation and give people reasons to keep coming back.
But Wild Space was not trying to become a global gaming franchise overnight. It had to translate those principles into a South African rewards ecosystem rooted in local culture, everyday shopping behaviour, brand participation and real-world value.
Platform
Wild Space as South Africa’s digital playground — where gaming, rewards, culture and brand stories meet.
Brand Blueprint
The purpose was to enrich lives through play, making digital interaction rewarding and fun.
The essence was connecting worlds, crafting stories and creating value.
The mission was to create a playful, rewarding digital universe where people could connect, explore and grow.
The values were not there to decorate a strategy slide and mind their business in the corner. They became rules for how the platform should behave.
- Innovation gave Wild Space permission to experiment with AR, digital missions, collectables and evolving mechanics.
- Community gave people a reason to participate beyond the transaction.
- Integrity made safety, transparency and parental confidence non-negotiable.
- Inclusivity rooted the platform in South Africa’s diversity.
- Creativity gave brands, users and the platform room to build.
Together, they protected the balance Wild Space needed: enough flexibility for partners to create inside the world, and enough consistency for users to recognise what kind of world they were entering.
Strategic Proposition:
Every interaction unlocks new discoveries.
This gave each audience a clear reason to participate without forcing the platform to become different things for different people.
For gamers, discovery meant challenges, status and rewards.
For shoppers, it meant extra value from everyday purchases.
For children, it meant safe play, characters and achievement.
For brands, it meant turning products into stories, missions and rewards.
For retailers, it meant making the store environment more participatory.
Giving Wild Space a clear strategic role:
Connect digital actions to real-world value in a way users wanted to repeat and partners could keep building on.
Strategic System
From there, the ecosystem had to be designed for growth, not just launch.
First Outpost could be the starting point, but Wild Space needed a structure that could hold more games, rewards, characters, collectables, brand stories, retail triggers and CRM moments over time without becoming a pile of disconnected features.
So I built the strategy around a repeatable participation loop, which gave Wild Space a simple behavioural architecture: every interaction had to move people from entry into engagement, from engagement into visible value, and from value into a reason to come back.
The loop gave Wild Space a simple behavioural architecture: every interaction had to move people from entry into engagement, from engagement into visible value, and from value into a reason to come back.
It turned a one-off scan into cumulative progress.
It also created the data logic.
Each interaction could reveal what someone played, collected, completed, ignored or returned for, allowing Wild Space to move from generic reward mechanics to more intelligent personalisation across the ecosystem.
Most importantly, the loop became a decision filter.
Any future feature, brand activation or retail mechanic had to answer three questions:
- Does it make the first action easier?
- Does it make participation feel more rewarding?
- Does it give people a reason to return?
That is what kept the platform coherent. Wild Space could expand into new mechanics and partnerships, but every addition still had to serve the same behavioural system.
B2B and Retailer Logic
The same loop had to work commercially.
For brands, Wild Space became a plug-and-play gamification ecosystem: a way to launch products, tell stories, drive specific behaviours and measure engagement without building a standalone gaming platform from scratch.
For retailers, it offered a practical shopper proposition: store visits, dwell time, basket-building opportunities and engagement mechanics that could make the retail environment feel more progressive.
This made governance critical.
Wild Space needed to give partners enough freedom to create meaningful activations, but enough structure to keep every execution native to the world. If every mission, character or reward felt like a thinly disguised advert, users would treat it like one. Gamers would not care. Shoppers would only use it for the discount. Children would lose interest. Retailers would struggle to justify the space.
The platform only worked if the exchange felt valuable on every side.
WILD SPACE
A repeatable participation platform
USERS
Value, progress, ownership∴ collectables, play, rewards
BRANDS
Low-barrier gamification, campaign value, 1PD
∴ missions, characters,data capture, product interaction
RETAILERS
Store traffic, dwell time, basket-building
∴ in-store participation,product discovery, innovation cue
A branded game world could not survive on novelty. Users needed reasons to participate. Brands needed reasons to invest. Retailers needed reasons to support it. The platform needed all three to keep feeding the loop.
So every activation had to work twice:
as marketing for the brand, and as progress for the user.
Brand stories had to become playable.Product interactions had to become missions.Rewards had to feel earned.Collectables had to create ownership.CRM had to point people back to something they wanted to complete.Retail participation had to feel like the beginning of the experience, not the admin before it.
Execution
The strategy shaped Wild Space as a world with rules, not a content lucky dip.
Product-linked scans became the doorway into the experience. Hyper-casual games made participation easy to start. WildBucks made the value exchange visible. Explorers and collectables gave users something to build and care about. Unlocks created a reason to keep going. CRM could then prompt return through incomplete collections, new drops, missions and rewards.
From there, the platform could scale through brand-specific quests, seasonal challenges, AR collectable hunts, physical rewards, community competitions, creator tools, live events, virtual goods, personalisation and a wider marketplace of digital and physical collectables.
But the work was never about throwing every possible feature into the universe and hoping something sparkled.
It was about defining what made each feature belong.
Impact
Wild Space drove:
4M+
WildBucks
generated
15%
in-store QR engagement vs
2% benchmark
251,000+
unique, trackable
sessions
77k+
downloads
during 2024 cycle*
