Our Story Begins
Our humble beginnings started in Vancouver, Canada in 2008 when veteran video game designer Steve Bocska — formerly of Disney, Electronic Arts, Vivendi — founded the company (originally called “Pug Pharm”) to create multiplayer online social video games. But by 2010 we saw a bigger opportunity: to use proven gameplay designs and technologies to solve business problems such as community loyalty, engagement, insights and user activation for big brands. With this vision, we decided to reposition ourselves towards the emerging opportunity of customer engagement and “gamification.”
Picnic is Born
Steve enlisted long-time friend Craig Dixon as COO, bringing 15 years of experience in user engagement platforms. He then led a thorough and lengthy research and development effort to create Picnic™ Customer Engagement Hub, an online SaaS platform. This platform enabled engagement designers to bring their ambitious visions to life, with features such as points, badges, leaderboards, virtual goods, and more. Picnic™ has evolved over the years to include an enterprise integration hub, administration tools, mini-games, APIs, SDKs, user profile services, advanced gamification modules, and specialized front-end web/mobile templates.
Core Beliefs
As time passed, we realized that big brands and other enterprises could benefit from the potential for deep community engagement in today’s “Pokemon Go” world. Our team, which includes game designers, knew that simply adding points, badges, and leaderboards wouldn’t be enough to engage customers. We needed a unique approach and technology that could deliver proven gameplay-oriented engagement mechanics such as collaboration, competition, customization, and collection.
Success and Recognition
Our novel approach has led to countless successful projects, happy customers, and industry recognition. We are highly regarded as thought leaders in digital marketing, loyalty, and gamification, sharing our knowledge regularly through presentations and articles. We have also developed a new tool, Steve’s Net Engagement Score (SNES), which a world’s-first for measures the “engagement health” of your community.
Today
Our team, located in Vancouver, Toronto, Dallas, and Mexico, is made up of video game designers, business analysts, marketing experts, and technology specialists. Using Picnic™ Customer Engagement Engine, we create engaging experiences for top global brands. Our solutions deliver 8x-12x more engagement than basic community loyalty offerings, are highly scalable and flexible, and come with low operating costs.
The World of PUG
One Team Many Talents
Steve Bocska
Founder & CEO
Paulo Herrera Morales
Senior Platform Engineer
Craig Dixon
Chief Product Officer
Juan Pablo Gonzalez
Special Projects
Lisa Brown
Chief Revenue Officer
Patrick Larrivee-Woods
Senior Platform Engineer
We partner with companies of all sizes, all around the world
PUG solutions were a big improvement over simple CRM’s and basic engagement technologies. It’s a fresh way of looking at integrated customer engagement.”
We selected PUG and their Picnic platform from over 30 suppliers around the world. They’ve helped us go where no one has gone before with customer engagement.”
It’s not just a traditional loyalty program. The broader platform provides opportunities to interact, play with us, and complete powerful interactive challenges, games, activities, and more — both online and in the real world.”
A response rate of two percent is good. A response rate of five percent would be a cause for celebration. The results for our program defies explanation (47.8%) .”
Get Started with PUG Now
Join our growing group of satisfied partners and brands who use PUG to build stronger customer relationships.