The Rich Dad Company, which promotes books, seminars, and now interactive media based off of the financial teachings from the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad" which has sold 30 million copies (but not without its criticism from financial writers), is taking its message to mobile with the launch of Rich Dad Interactive. Their first app is a learning app called Clutch, and with it and future apps, they're returning to the idea that sparked "Rich Dad Poor Dad:" teaching through gaming elements, or gamification.
Clutch is a learning app that will "take the physical [aspects] of Rich Dad, turn it into a mobile app, and gamify it a little bit, and teach people [in] the way that we're all really learning today, through videos like YouTube, through activities, using social media and being able to share…'bragging rights,' or what class you took or what investments you made," according to Director of Technology Shane Caniglia. He says that gaming elements are there and play a key part of what Clutch will be, with social media functionality, "there's unlock features in there that you have to make it through certain phases in order to unlock the next, and the last thing, I think the most importantly, the ability to simulate the experiences of investing in real life through Clutch as a tool."
Gamification is nothing new to the Rich Dad Company - author Richard Kiyosaki and his wife Kim (an author of financial books herself) created a board game in the mid-90's called Cashflow 101 that tried to teach the income philosophies he espouses: namely, having assets that generate more income than one's expenses in order to be independently wealthy. Ironically, Caniglia says that when Kiyosaki "created the board game, the lessons didn't necessarily translate from the game to the players. So he actually wrote the book as, this is kind of a funny story, as a marketing brochure to support the lessons in the game." And then it wound up succeeding as a New York Times bestseller and kind of supplanted the gamification that was attempted with the Cashflow 101 game.
But with Rich Dad Interactive, it's a return to that kind of gamification strategy. Times have changed, and gamification is a more robust concept, and that's what Clutch will try to do. It's adaptable, too: Caniglia says "we created it as a framework, so we can plug any type of content that we want in it, so it's completely flexible and agile in that world, and that was a mission of ours from a tech standpoint."
Caniglia sees this move to apps like Clutch and the upcoming mobile version of Cashflow 101 as key for the future of Rich Dad. "The general population just does not have an interest in attending seminars. The transition for us to digital is actually a fairly easy one - it's the only way the brand can survive, number one. Number two, because we started out really as a board game... it's a very easy transition for us to take our IP and turn it into these fun, interactive tools that we can now deploy on the mobile platforms. So the time is right for Rich Dad in order to reinvent itself as a brand but also to get to a younger demographic that, their lives are built around their mobile devices."
