18 / 100
18
// PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // September/October 2016
for more sales by improving their in-store
presentation. This is how a product or
category convinces a national account it’s
worth the space it occupies and more im-
portantly grows. Identify a trend, show the
account how the trend is affecting prod-
uct movement, store traffic, and profit,
and make a case for growing those num-
bers by improving space and positioning.
I would submit Lottery could tell a very
impressive story. The facts are on our side
and our corporate partners are starting to
understand lottery’s potential, but unless
we utilize real time data analytics enabled
by API technology to harness and success-
fully manage sales data from a $70 billion
category, we’ll be left with nothing more
than unrealized potential.
When you consider sales and profit at
retail are measured down to the square
inch (shelf and floor), you start to real-
ize how important data is. Implement-
ing API to get into an account is just the
beginning. Applying new technologies
and improving our ability to leverage
data-analytics to drive performance is an
on-going process. And yes, every vendor
must constantly defend their product
space with real time data. And not just
big picture sales data. Corporate retail-
ers also expect their vendors to be able to
drill down in a granular way to look for
ways to improve performance.
What kinds of granular data are they look-
ing for?
T. Delacenserie:
Knowing what other
products are in the basket with lottery
products for example. “Other products”
share so much about a consumer and pro-
vide a rich canvass of opportunities for
both retailers and manufacturers includ-
ing cross sell promotions and marketing/
merchandising strategies. Basket size, oth-
er product types, cost, frequency of store
visits, purchase time of day … frankly, the
kinds of data, intelligence, and insights it
provides is limited only by our imagina-
tion. It all helps us to understand consum-
er behavior and to fine-tune our strategies
to match product, place, price, and pro-
motion to synchronize with that behavior.
For instance, it has been claimed that
lottery is being purchased disproportion-
ately by the lower-income segment of so-
ciety. A few years ago we worked with a
corporate supermarket account on a pro-
motional idea. The idea was to cross pro-
mote lottery with an in-store non-lottery
product. We also worked with an inde-
pendent marketing organization to track
the “other products” that were in a basket
when someone bought a lottery ticket.
The results contradicted the perception.
We saw high-end olive oils, specialty
breads from the store’s bakery, and other
products that didn’t fit the narrative of
lower-income consumers buying lottery
along with beer and cigarettes. The lottery
player was just as likely as the non-lottery
player to buy high-end products. This is
the kind of information that is especially
valuable to corporate accounts.
Knowing what is in the basket would also
help us to substantiate our claim that Lottery
is a driver of store traffic and residual sales.
T. Delacenserie:
True story: When we
did the first Walmart Neighborhood Mar-
ket test, I was in a store at 6:00 a.m. with
two executives from Bentonville to wit-
ness the sale of the first lottery ticket. One
of the first tickets sold was to a customer
who, seeing three guys in suits at the end
of the check lane, approached us unsolic-
ited and asked if we were with Walmart.
She thanked the gentlemen from Walmart
for adding Lottery to the store’s product
mix explaining how she had to drive past
the store each morning to a less convenient
retailer to buy her tickets. She continued
saying, “I’m really happy knowing I’ll be
able to get my lottery tickets at Neighbor-
hood Market.” Now think about the vol-
ume of customer traffic that enters a store
like a Walmart Super-Store each week.
What percent of those customers leave to
go to a competitor to buy a lottery ticket
or worse, go past the store because they
don’t carry lottery?
Publix is a grocery store that sells a bil-
lion dollars a year in lottery products in
Florida alone. Why don’t they require the
higher level of data reporting that other
multi-state retailers require?
T. Delacenserie:
Actually, they do and
rightfully so, continually prod us for bet-
ter information and data integration. At a
recent business review we did with Publix,
they included a vendor performance ap-
praisal they do with all of their suppliers.
Their scorecard has six categories grading
performance on a scale from one to five,
five being the highest. For the last three or
four years, we have received all fives except
in one category. That category is technol-
ogy and data collection. While they un-
derstand as a Lottery we’re at least partly
dependent on industry technology, their
expectation is that we work with both the
vendor community and the industry to
improve inefficiencies and inconsistencies
relative to equipment and data collection.
I strongly dislike not meeting Publix or
any account’s expectations, and with that
in mind, respectfully submit that all lot-
teries all around the country could ben-
efit by collaborating to meet the needs of
these corporate accounts. Every state has
large corporate accounts with the same
needs, and frankly, we’re in jeopardy of
not being able to increase our sales and
net funding to Lottery’s beneficiaries if we
fail to provide it to them.
What about the obstacles to implementa-
tion? How can consensus be built to move
forward with an action-plan?
T. Delacenserie:
I don’t presume to
have all the answers to that question. I
would just point out that we’ve done it be-
fore and we just need to do it again. Imag-
ine what it must have been like for the
handful of states which started Powerball
back in 1988. These states were all operat-
ing independent businesses, with diverse
operating systems and IT, and methods of
accounting and reporting, and contractual
relationships with retailers and all manner
of obstacles to overcome. The issues they
had to wrestle down were no less formi-
dable than the ones we need to deal with
to modernize now. And the urgency of our
current challenges is at least as pressing as
theirs were then. They did it back in 1988,
and we should be able to do it now.
■