HOW LUXURY BRANDS USE GAMIFICATION TO TRAIN AT GLOBAL SCALE
In luxury and retail, brands face the same paradox: they need training feels intimate, human, and on-brand, but they also need that to reach thousands of advisors across dozens of countries, languages, and retailers.
This is where gamification has become a strategic tool. Across our conversations with L’Artisan Parfumeur, CHANEL, Rabanne, and Sephora, a pattern emerges: the brands that scale training best are the ones treating it less like “e-learning” and more like an immersive brand experience.
Emraude sits right in the middle of that shift: an elearning agency focused specifically on luxury and retail, designing gamified experiences that can live everywhere from a Sephora staff room to a CHANEL counter in an airport.
Why Traditional Trainings are not performing at Scale
Classic approaches struggle beyond a single country or a single launch:
- Slide decks and PDFs don’t travel well. They lose nuance and feel off-brand.
- Long classroom sessions are hard to replicate in every market with the same quality.
- Standard LMS modules often feel generic, especially to advisors surrounded by rich brand imagery all day.
The result is familiar: low completion, low engagement, and a widening gap between the brand’s ambition and what actually happens with clients.
Sophie Robinson from L’Artisan Parfumeur sums up the core problem of “old-school” training: “When you get too technical, it doesn’t work for creating emotions. You need to tell simple stories.”
At global scale, that gets amplified. If the training doesn’t spark emotion, it simply disappears.
Gamification as a Creative Extension of the Brand
Emily, Digital Project Manager at CHANEL in Global Retail Education, explains why the form of training matters as much as the content: “From the start, tell the story of the brand, create the immersion, make the learners feel engaged.”
Gamification is the architecture that makes this possible at scale. It lets brands:
1. Create a dedicated world
- in L’Artisan Parfumeur: an illustrated Parisian apartment for the La Maison collection, where advisors move from room to room, discovering candles and the iconic amber ball.
- in Rabanne: a 3D time-travel journey through the house’s history, structured in short chapters so advisors can play between clients.
- at Sephora: an Olympic-inspired health and safety challenge, with scores, medals and a podium moment instead of a static compliance course.
2. Embed brand codes into every interaction
Our CHANEL’s elearning modules are instantly recognizable as CHANEL: through visuals, pacing, typography, animation… before a single word is read. The game itself behaves like a brand touchpoint.
3. learning becomes game people want to finish
Progress bars, challenges, branching scenarios, scoring, unlockable content, these mechanics that keep players in a game can be used to keep advisors inside the story a little longer.
This is exactly how Emraude designs its product training experiences: as brand-native games that just happen to deliver learning.
Scaling Across Markets and Languages
Global luxury brands live across countries, cultures and retailers. Training has to follow.
From our talk with learning directors, three recurring constraints show up:
- Advisors don’t all speak the same language.
- Not every market has the same training resources.
- Launch calendars and assortments differ.
Gamified learning helps by design, because:
- The visual language does a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s easier to localise text than to rebuild an experience from scratch.
- The experience can be built once and rolled out in multiple languages
- Markets can plug in local content, competitions or follow-ups around a shared core.
At Emraude, this is a core part of the brief. Experiences are built with:
- Multi-language architecture (text separation, flexible UI, tested layouts).
- Integration into different LMS environments and devices.
- Central governance for content, but room for local activations.
The result: a Parisian advisor and a Dubai advisor might not share the same store, but they can share the same training world and then make it their own.
Design Principles from our clients and Emraude team
Discussing with learning directors, we almost reverse-engineer a playbook.
1. Start from a strong concept
Is it an apartment? A time machine? An Olympics? A mystery? Every successful project you talk about has a single, clear concept that everyone remembers.
2. Use emotion as the entry point
The first contact should be emotional. Explanations, quizzes and details arrive later, when people are already engaged.
3. Respect frontline reality
Learners, especially in retail, don’t have 60 minutes to sit down. It has to break down into short segments. Gamification at scale only works if it respects time available on the floor.
4. Design for update and longevity
The brands you work with aren’t building throwaway games. They’re building assets that need to survive new collections, new product rules. Emraude’s job is to make sure those experiences can be updated without being rebuilt.
Emraude’s agency: Specialist in Global Gamified Learning
Most agencies can design a nice game. Very few:
- Understand the real constraints of luxury retail (multi-brand travel retail, selective distribution, POS diversity).
- Know how to keep brand identity intact inside a gamified experience.
Q&A
Isn’t gamification just a trend?
Our clients describe it less as a trend and more a response to reality: advisors are overwhelmed, attention is short, and expectations for quality are high. Games and interactive worlds are simply the most effective format to compete with everything else on their phones.
How do we keep a global gamified project on-brand?
Start with a clear creative direction anchored in the brand codes (colours, typography, voice, pacing). Involving brand and communication teams early ensures that the game feels like a natural extension of campaigns and boutiques, not something separate.
What about markets with low tech or older devices?
Emraude works with 2D/3D experiences that run smoothly on all and with total size <30mo. Gamification doesn’t have to mean VR and heavy assets.
How is impact measured at global scale?
Start simple: completion, replay, quiz results, scenario choices. Then connect that data with business indicators (sell-out on hero products, attachment rate, NPS). Over time, patterns emerge: markets that embraced the game early often show better alignment on launches and rituals.
What is the first step if we’ve never done gamified learning?
Pick one high-stakes topic: a hero launch, a strategic collection, or an anniversary, and treat it as a flagship project. Design one strong, gamified experience with Emraude, roll it out to a few pilot markets, collect feedback, and scale from there.