As with any new (ish) concept, gamification suffers from a great deal of misunderstanding in the public. As such people often don’t understand what they are asking for when they say “We want gamification”. To some, that might mean “We want a game”, to others it may be “We want to inject some game mechanics to help with motivation.”
This puts the gamification designer in a difficult position, because very often the first thing the client asks for, may not be what they actually want or need. I spoke about having what you want vs what you need a while back and it is incredibly important to understand the difference!