Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Happy Holidays and The Elf on the Shelf | Episode 373

 

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This time of the year we reflect on the importance of taking time off during the holidays, sharing personal experiences with family traditions like the Elf on the Shelf. We dive deeper into how this new tradition fits into the broader Santa universe and the strategies behind creating engaging experiences that are limited in time. We also have a question for you! It relates to the planning strategies for the new year, whether or not encouraging reflection on personal and professional goals.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

Links to episode mentions:

 

Some Episode Takeaways

  • The Elf on the Shelf as a modern holiday tradition.
  • Expanding existing narratives can create new engagement opportunities.
  • Limited time experiences can heighten excitement and engagement.
  • You don’t always need to create something new; existing themes can be effective.
  • Integrating seasonal themes into projects can attract interest.
  • Creating a sense of novelty can enhance user experience.

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob (00:00)
Hey, this is Professor Game where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant. I’m a coach and I’m the founder here at Professor Game. And I’m also a professor of gamification and game inspired solutions at IE University, IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University and other places around the world. And before we dive into the interview, if you’re struggling,

with engagement in your business and are looking to find out how to make your users stay with you, you will find our free community full of resources quite useful. You can find it for free in the links below in the description.

Rob (00:44)
Hey, Engagers, and welcome to this episode of the Professor Game Podcast, this holidays episode. I’m always excited to do these episodes because I’ve realized that I’ve started to become a little bit of a tradition in these times where, you know, it’s whether it’s the summer holidays, whether it’s the winter holidays, I do think that taking this opportunity to take even, you know, just a very few days to take off and to reflect, I found that to be reinvigorating and getting you ready for many new things.

opportunities coming up and all that stuff. So I’m going to continue to recommend that over and over again to you. But the first thing and probably one of the most important objectives of this episode is to wish you some very happy holidays, however it is, and whomever it is that you decide to spend them with. I do wish you all the best. Enjoy again, take that little bit of time off, reflect or just enjoy and have something different from what tends to be your day to day your work.

Everything it is that you’re doing so I I wish you all the best whatever it is again your religion Whatever it is that you’re celebrating most cultures are celebrating something during the season or even just some time off from work Please take that time to celebrate to take some time with yourself to think to reflect take some time with friends family whomever you want to spend that with and I’ve always started trying to when I do these solo episodes to try to incorporate something

Some of my reflections some of the things that I’ve observed in the world recently and right now as you You’ve probably heard me a million times in the podcast lately, you know, I have a very young daughter right now She just made two years old and we started this, know, I think it’s relatively new I honestly haven’t researched it too much, but this it’s a relatively new tradition the elf on the shelf I don’t know if you’ve heard it

So we started this and I started to after a bit of doing some of this, I started to realize that if you put on as you’d like to know, you know, I didn’t realize that at the time when we created the logo, I’d like to say that I do, but I’m very, very honest when I talk about about things, the glasses that you see in the logo, I like to say about, you know, putting on some glasses and when you see things through these lens, these glasses of games and gamification, you start.

understanding things from a different perspective. You start to see things in a different way and you’re able to analyze them as well a little bit. So I don’t want to take too long because this is essentially an episode where I want to, as I said before, congratulate you on the holidays and wish you all the best. But I did want to introduce some of this magic, so to speak, into the episode with the analysis of the Elf of the Shelf. And of course, it also is very much into the season and into what many celebrate as the Christmas season and has to do with this elf on the shelf.

What does the Elf on the Shelf do or what have at least we been doing? I know there’s a book that comes with it and tells you some recommendations and so on. So thing is you get the Elf on the Shelf. sort of here she arrives to your home. You name the Elf of the Shelf. Our daughter decided on a name for the Elf. Of course, we said like 50 names before she said, yeah, that’s the one I want. And you put the name, you sort of have a birth certificate where you put the name down.

So everything is very well wrapped into this theme. And one of the things that at least we’ve been doing, and I understand there’s some small variations of this as well, is every morning when our daughter wakes up, she finds the elf in a different place doing something, right? She’s found the elf on top of the milk that she has. She’s found him on the Christmas tree. She’s found the elf sitting on my chair. She’s found the elf in many different places, and she’s kind of always excited to find him there.

In the different places that that that he’s been showing up right? Yeah, it’s our elf is a he in this case There’s a there’s a I don’t know if there’s a discussion on it or not But there seems to be a bit of the the sort of the lore of the of the elf on the shelf is that you know He’s doing naughty stuff or I’m not sure if it’s kind of naughty or just you know home alone kind of things I’m not exactly sure

our tendency has been more to for him to be doing nice things, So it’s like getting on top of again, he’s drinking some milk, you know, it’s a normal thing to do sitting on a chair, like, it’s not something naughty. We don’t want to set that example in any way for for our daughter to see that. I know, maybe it does have some benefits to see that elsewhere. I don’t know. But that’s that’s what we have decided. And of course,

That’s the way that these things tend to happen. You as a kind of the designers of this experience for our daughter, we have made these choices. Another thing that I wanted to highlight here is how well and whomever created this, again, quote unquote new tradition, it fits into what we can call the Santa verse, this fits perfectly, perfectly into, Santa, the whole story of Santa in the North Pole. The elf comes from the North Pole.

comes and visit nearby Christmas leaves, soon after Christmas to continue working with Santa is associated with the gifts that the kids get. So it fits very well into this whole universe. And the dressing is red and everything again fits in very, very well. So they did a good job. Just like recently we’ve seen. Well, recently in the past few years, we’ve seen how these universes from D.C., from Marvel, from Star Wars,

from Hogwarts, all these universes are sort of expanding around into different places. LEGO, one of them, for example, that you see, you know, the LEGO pieces, there’s LEGO movies and LEGO games of Star Wars, for example. So it’s, it’s all extension of this universe. You see how Star Wars is having different movies and also games, also, comic books, everything like these universes are sort of expanding. The Elf on the Shelf seems to be an attempt of expanding this Santa verse as well. of, sort of growing it bigger.

in many different ways. at least in my experience, it’s been relatively successful to that as everything as again, as with Star Wars, with Star Trek, with, the Lord of the Rings as well, which has had its expansions and so on with Marvel and DC has its fans, people who love it, people who don’t care about it, people who hate it. That’s, you know, pretty normal. But I’m precisely talking about those people who would be a potential audience for that. In our case, our family, we would argue that it has been pretty successful.

The other thing that is important and that I think is also a strategy that we see from games and we’ve learned from games and that can be applied in many, many different circumstances is that it’s for a limited time. We were talking the other day. She’s very, very young again. She’s two years old. We’re saying, yeah, well, you you can start saying goodbye because Christmas is just about to finish. And, know, once Christmas is done, he’s going to go back to Santa and to work in the workshop and do all the stuff that they do throughout the year because the elf is not going to be around. We’re not going to be playing with

you know, the same thing with the elf all year round because you kind of run out of arguments and stuff. And it’s also fun to have some novelty and that kind of thing during Christmas. In any case, it is for a limited time, right? It starts, it ends, and then it’s done. Then maybe it comes back, like, you know, it’s seasons in Fortnite, some things that happen, the season happened, and then some things might be brought back, some characters and so on. This happens the same way. Happens, depending on how you decide to do it, but let’s say…

somewhere near to Christmas, let’s say November, and some say it’s the 25th of December, some might do it a little bit longer. But in February, you’ll definitely if you sort of follow the standards. So such a thing, by February, you’ll definitely not have the elf around. So most of the year, the elf in the shelf is not going to be around. It’s limited time. So the enjoyment is sort of focused in there. And that brings further joy to those things that

It also associates to one of the things that we tend to do with our daughter is, as many kids were blessed with the fact that she has more toys than she can play with in a day for sure. And even in a week, I would say. So we try to put away some of the toys so she can play with some of them. And then we put some of those away and bring out quote unquote new ones. They’re not new. It’s just that she didn’t see them for a while. And then she feels like she can be excited and play with them again. So it is along those same lines also.

Another thing that I’ve seen and we actually enjoyed ourselves is that in several cities around the world, they have sort of events around the elf on the shelf. I’m not sure exactly how that fits into their commercial strategy or whatever that is, but there are. literally went and we visited the elf on the shelf on a sort of small mall that there is here in Madrid. Our daughter got to know a huge elf right there. She hugged the elf. she kissed the elf. She was super over the top excited about meeting.

The elf in person she didn’t really know what was happening when we got there, but then she saw him It was like everything changed. She was running around because he had to take a break Of course, it was hanging around for 20 minutes. I had to take a break then when he came back She was super excited again. She couldn’t wait to get in then she hugged him gave him, High-five everything that she could do with him. She she definitely tried. We’ve got a bunch of pictures these physical gatherings bring those things that in our case there’s no digital world for her but from the books from the stories from

the toy, but also into a real physical world, which we can again translate from the digital into the physical. That combination of different experiences, I think is something that we’ve learned that works pretty well in different experiences joining together. Again, the digital or the lore with something physical, something actually to do or to share with different people around, in a specific place. this is definitely somebody whoever created it.

is having a blast with all the trademarks and all the stuff that they created because there’s plenty of, I don’t know, merchandising and whatnot happening around the world of the Elf of the Shelf. They have books, have the dolls and the toys themselves. These events are probably associated to them. They’re selling others. Like, I’m sure that this was, just like many other things, it was created for a purpose and it is serving the purpose quite well. And that makes sense. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I think there is…

a good way that that can happen. if it brings further enjoyment and it doesn’t mean that you have to, I don’t know, like it’s just, think overall it has a very positive balance. one of the things that I see here and that I realize is you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you’re creating something, In their case, they did invent something, pretty new. The whole elf in the shelf concept is new.

still is not entirely new. it integrates into the Santa verse, as I said before, it has all these things that, are already created, and it sort of fits very well. But even if you don’t want to create something associated to something, you don’t even need to create something new, For your business, for your projects, for whatever it is that you have going on. Oftentimes, very often, you can use what is already out there where people are already looking at getting excited about

We mentioned a few weeks ago, I it was one of our emails, we talked about Halloween and how the theme fits into what many people are getting excited about. Well, Elf on the Shelf did the same thing. You can do the same thing. Use whatever is happening outside in the world that fits whatever your purpose may be. If it’s educational for young kids, probably the Elf on the Shelf could be a good fit. Christmas in general, or the holidays, or the winter season. Whatever is happening out in the world.

See if there are ways in which you can integrate it to your project project to bring, as I was saying before, something new, something that is quote unquote limited time offer, so to speak, happens for a while. It brings some novelty, changes some things up, and it just leaves and something new comes in or, you get back to to the same things that you were doing before. And then something new comes back because you want to keep people excited about what’s going on, especially if you’re looking at this in the long run, in the long term, which

when you’re talking about real deep engagement and true loyalty, you don’t tend to be talking about this in a one off in a one time thing where you you get to meet people and then it’s over, It’s like, well, this is a Snoopy Christmas, So this has been going on for decades and it’s been fantastic. But it’s not like very few people are living day to day all day around something that has to do with Snoopy every now and then bringing it up, bringing it back. In the case of us, holidays tend to have,

We love the Snoopy episodes and the stuff during the holiday. So we bring up these sweaters. We have a couple. Our daughter has one has sort of a meaning. And then they sort of go back to where they were and then they will come back at some point. So, again, bringing these possibilities out from the world, integrating into existing again, respecting all trademarks and all that stuff if needed, but integrating into those worlds or even just taking from what is happening out there and using it for whatever your purposes are is something that definitely

could make sense for you. And I want to close this episode with a question. There’s many theories and there’s many people doing different things when the years are beginning. And you’ll be seeing this episode very close to the end of the year or to the start of the year, hopefully, if you see it when it’s going live, or you can see it later. It doesn’t matter. Because what I want to ask from you, and I’m not going to still reveal what it is.

that I do and to be completely fair, I’ve done different things as well. But in any case, I don’t want to tell you exactly what I do because I want to hear hear it from you. When you’re looking into a new year, some people love to think, oh, what are my objectives for 2025? In this case, what am I going to achieve that you reflect back on what you made in 2024? Then you look forward to 2025, make a plan of what the year may look like and so on. There’s other people say, you know what?

January is just like another month. Let me plan the next month ahead and I’ll continue to do that. Other people say, you know what, I’m not a planning person. I just continue to go with the flow or I’m going to just going to plan the next day, the next week. And that’s it. What does it look like for you? Do you when the year ends, do you set this sort of new year objectives or, you know, personally for your business? How do you do it? What do you do when these days come? And the answer again could be absolutely nothing different.

Or it could be, I change everything and I take a few days off to just reflect on what’s coming to the new year and everything, of course, everything in between. I’m to leave you that question. What do you do when the new year comes from the perspective of planning towards that new year, the new month, that new week, whatever that looks like for you? So again, Engagers, as we love to say often in every single episode, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

Rob (14:55)
Hey, Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on Skool? You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there. Join us. It’s a platform called Skool. It’s for free, and you will find plenty of resources there.

We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

End of transcription