Do people consider gamification a feature, business concept, or strategy?

I took a course on gamification it cleared a lot of thing up but I'm still confuse. A gamified app or website has to be build from ground up through the lens of a game designer. So, I think is a major part of the business concept and it should be highlighted in the executive Summary.Furthermore, it makes the startup unique from other competitors in my industry.

Now, I was told that gamification is little feature and it shouldn't be a major highlight in the executive summary but part of product strategy. Also, I had someone else to tell me it's not important to add executive summary because is a feature. Please, I need someone to clear it up for me.

If you look at stackexchange and it's gamification, it's not critical to the site's functionality. It's "a feature." However, it's gamification is one of the reasons it became so popular and it is used so much. It was/is critical to their business strategy and growth.

I would include the details in the executive summary if it's going to be a way to increase sales, increase usage, and be critical to the success and growth of your product.

Creating an account, logging in, filling out a forgot password form - are features. So are the intricate details of how you are going to make your product fun and addictive. But, to a company like Zynga, it's not just a feature - the gamification is critical. So it's a strategy and feature, yeah.

I would think gamification is a customer acquisition / retention strategy, and can be a competitive advantage in a crowded market. The canonical example would be dropbox, where (initially) one could only gain additional space by getting friends to sign up. Their sync model and native "drive" support was also great for the time as well - so it wasn't all just social marketing.

The business plan (and summary) is what you make it. If you believe that a number of features + gamification is the go to market strategy that will gain traction, then present it. Get some customer data to prove it. You'll always have someone giving you an opinion that is counter to yours. The key is presenting your strategy with as few assumptions (i.e. validated customer data) as possible.