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November/December 2015 // PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL //
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differences that affect how they buy, what they buy, how
much they spend, and what they purchase. At its heart,
segmentation is about identifying groups of people who
respond differently to products and marketing so efforts
can be focused on your most profitable prospects.
The concept of segmenting markets erupted in the
1970s as a response to mass brands giving way to ‘niche’
markets and brand extensions. The question became,
“Why treat everyone the same?” It wasn’t long before
everyone was doing ‘segmentation research’. The key
difference between segmenting by motivation versus
other criteria such as demographics is that motivations
are not likely to dramatically change. In fact, this type
of segmentation work only needs refreshing every five
to seven years to accommodate any major shifts in the
market.
After vetting several globally renowned research firms
for our segmentation project, we enthusiastically
selected Boston-based CMB , a top 50 market research
and consulting firm. CMB’s prior experience in gaming
helped us decide on the appropriate design for our needs
(Max-Diff) and enabled them to quickly understand our
criteria for project success:
1. Simple
– The entire approach and findings needed
to be easy to explain.
2. Actionable
– When the final results were in, and we
were working with the data, it had to be delivered in
a manner that was actionable for our customers.
3. Differentiator
– As mentioned
earlier, our goal is commercial insight
across Scientific Games’ customer
portfolio. We wanted to ensure
we established an instrument that
could deliver.
We also incorporated a number of
strategic goals pertaining to scope and
usability. We required a global roadmap
to support our customers worldwide, so
we started with the U.S. and Europe and
will add more to our research over time.
We included all aspects of a consumer’s
wallet – general entertainment, gaming
and lottery – so that the findings
could be applied to our product
development efforts across our lottery, gaming and
interactive business. And we needed our study sample
to be representative of the entire market population. We
often see “player” segmentation that is acceptable when
trying to assess a core market (i.e. active players). But if a
goal is to understand the potential of new players, then
including only existing players defeats the purpose.
After weeks of design across business groups, weeks of
interviewing and days pouring over models, we finally
reached our goals for the study. We now have deeper
clarity into motivation-based segments and massive
data to use across the Scientific Games organization.
Because of the many nuances in player preferences
with instant games and our market position with these
products, we drilled down beyond total gaming to the
instant player level to best serve our game development.
With our framework in place, the real work begins.
Applying the findings to create tangible solutions for
our customers is where we begin to discover commercial
insights.
U.S. INSTANT SEGMENTS
EUROPEAN INSTANT SEGMENTS
U.S. & EUROPEAN GAMING
SEGMENTS