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// PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // January/February 2016
Three (Un) Conventional
Strategies to Stimulate
Sales of Lottery Tickets.
By Ulli Appelbaum,
First-The-Trousers-Then-The Shoes
Brand Consultancy
L
ottery agencies are on a constant quest to balance
meaningful sales and profit increases with cost con-
trols, in order to increase their contributions to
their states. In my experience, most of them are very
skilled in doing so, through savvy product portfolio management,
maximizing their marketing ROI and through constant focus on
optimizing the POS experience.
We’d like to add to their existing arsenal of ideas by suggest-
ing 3 additional ways to drive incremental revenue. These three
solutions are already used successfully by marketers in other cat-
egories, and they’re based on important lessons from behavioral
science and our own experience. They may even be recognizable
- to some extent, they’re already used in the lottery industry
1. Act like a peacock at POS, stand out
As anyone who’s spent any time in the category at all knows,
POS is crucial to driving sale. According to research First-The-
Trousers did for the Indiana State Lottery and IGT, around 50%
of the decision to play is triggered at point of sale. The problem?
There’s a multitude of available games and most frankly look
alike and operate within the same form and visual conventions.
This may be okay for core players who are very familiar with the
games and for whom the newest game might stand out, but this
“visual confusion and overload of choices” will most likely act as
a deterrent to “light players,” “non-players” or younger genera-
tions of players the industry so desperately needs to attract.
In Behavioral Economics, this phenomenon is called “Choice
Overload” or “overchoice.” In fact, research has shown that this
phenomenon occurs as a result of too many choices being avail-
able to consumers. Overchoice has been associated with unhap-
piness (Schwartz, 2004), decision fatigue (players not being
willing to put the extra effort required to make a decision), as
well as choice deferral—avoiding making a decision altogether,
such as not buying a product (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000) (source:
http://www.behavioraleconomics.com/).
Not the best starting point to attract new players into the category.
So what can a lottery agency do about this? After all, the avail-
able in-store real estate is very limited and there are only so
many pop-ups and stand-alone displays it can set up.
a) Elevate existing and successful tactics into strategies.
In order to stand out, a game needs to look and feel different
from the other 40 (or 100) games it is displayed with. This is such
an obvious statement; it is almost embarrassing to write about.
And yet this simple principle doesn’t seem to get systematically
applied at point of sale.
We can already witness examples of this happening in the in-
dustry. Best case in point, were the “super tickets” used in some
jurisdictions last year which are basically oversized tickets. The
mechanism of the game didn’t really change, but its extra-large
size helped it stand out at POS. And sell.