Why Your Casino Offers are Going Downhill – Big Data Update
Here is something I wrote in my book More Frugal Gambler, published in 2003. This was in the chapter talking about the casino host system, a rant about using the term “player development.”
I HATE the term “player development.” I have visions of wild-eyed scientists in the casino basement, madly working with multi-colored fluids and rows and rows of test tubes, cooking up a potion to add to the casino’s free drinks that will turn a sensible thrifty deliberate conservative nickel-playing Iowa hog farmer into a reckless loud-mouthed out-of-control money-flinging red-eyed marathon high limit slot player.
Even more sinister, I see psychologists, advertising mavens, market researchers, and time-study experts sitting around a large boardroom table discussing how they can get gray-haired retirees to dig into that deep dark part of their wallet, take out the $20 stashed for emergencies, and try to hit that progressive jackpot that they know is “due.”
I can develop myself — my character, my physical body, my mind — all by myself, thank you. I don’t want to walk into a casino and feel I’m a subject in an experiment.
What happened to the warm word “host”? Having a host in a casino gives you the feeling that you’re coming into a place that’s personal, inviting, friendly, a place that’s — well — like home.
Fast-forward 14 years – and recently I see this seminar advertised for casino executives:
Finding the Unconscious Drivers of Customer Behavior:
An overview of neuroscience and other advanced marketing tools to understand your customers at the deepest level.
Are you struggling to find new insights about your core customer? Are you searching for more effective ways to attract your competitors’ customers? Or, perhaps you’re working on how to attract a whole new segment, like Millennials?
Ask yourself, do you really understand customers’ deepest needs and desires that are so vital to your company’s success?
If you answer no to this last question, you’re not alone. Most marketers still use obsolete models of consumer behavior and outdated research tools to try to understand their customers.
No longer are traditional tools like focus groups and web surveys enough. Advances in technology and the mind sciences have changed the marketing research landscape. We now have the opportunity to use more powerful tools based on neuroscience that truly get inside our customers’ minds.
I didn’t know how reasonable my fears really were in 2003!
One very knowledgeable gambler, who has many casino executive contacts, discussed this subject of “big data” with me, saying that the new way of casino marketing is very different from the “old-school” way that we long-time gamblers are used to. Data formerly was used as a tool to deepen the relationship with the customer; now it is used as a weapon. The one big theme today in casino management is that they are trying to predict future behavior instead of rewarding past action.
Examples abound. One large casino corporation just rolled out a companywide program where a computer is telling the hosts which players to call. The computer is now able to use all this big data to figure out who is most likely to be able to be convinced into making an extra trip or who would not be worth the host’s time in making a phone call. I have a friend who discovered this concept just recently. He started playing at a new casino, at a level that gave him contact with a host at similar-size casinos where he played. He wanted to talk to a host at this new casino so he asked at the players club desk whether he had been assigned to a host yet or, if not, could he be given the name of one. They said, not in a friendly way either, that “the computer would decide when he could contact a host.”
Are we casino gamblers doomed to be forever the victims of cold-hearted computers? Stay tuned and in my next blog I will discuss whether we can do anything about this disturbing trend.