Standing out in a generic industry

I didn’t want to start this column on a downer, but I think we need to address an important home truth before we begin – as far as most of the industry is concerned, a casino is a casino is a casino.

As counterintuitive as it might sound coming from someone in my position, I’m afraid the harsh reality is that we’re all operating in a generic industry. While there are innovations taking place, they’re not usually game-changing and the majority of them only happen in unregulated markets.

For an entity like LCKY Group that’s firmly focused on regulated markets, the question therefore becomes “how should we embrace this generic industry and what steps do we need to take to ensure that our brands stand out?” It’s certainly a multi-faceted challenge and there are a number of important factors involved, but one place for operators to start is with their name.

Telling a story that resonates

For those familiar with our story, LCKY Group began life as Glitnor Group, a Swedish company with Swedish founders. While we had great success under that label, as we grew, it became increasingly clear that we needed a name capable of resonating with audiences on a global scale.

Above all else, Glitnor is a hard concept for those outside of Scandinavia to grasp. It’s difficult to tell a story about a cave from the old Icelandic sagas to those who don’t have this as a cultural frame of reference, so while it had meaning to our own team, its international impact was limited.

‘I simply wouldn’t start anything without having the right people already in place’

A couple of years ago, we started using LCKY Group internally for our B2C side and, following our acquisition of One Casino, the name stuck. With the platform being live in the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain – and Glitnor being present in the Nordics and Ontario – it felt natural to call the wider business something that more people could get behind, and that’s where we are today.

Although the vision and the core of who we want to be remains unchanged, through the new name we’ve worked hard to communicate our aims clearly and give ourselves a platform for further-reaching success.

People power always matters

But beyond a name, what is it that makes a “strong brand”? Although it may sound kitschy, I’m a firm believer that people are everything. In an industry as generic as iGaming, having a team behind you that has deep competence and a thorough appreciation of the local markets you’re targeting is a crucial differentiator that really could be make or break for your chances of success.

I simply wouldn’t start anything without having the right people already in place. In regulated markets – particularly those that are already quite mature – knowing that your team understands the ins and outs of everything gives you the reassurance that you need to make optimal decisions every time; and I truly do believe that we have this at LCKY Group.

Bolstered by these strong foundations, business can begin to focus on one “boring” aspect that nevertheless needs to be mastered if you want to succeed in regulated markets – processes. By that I mean figuring out the areas of your operations that can be automated and how this might provide you with a competitive edge, both of which are dependent on the knowledge of your team.

With this as the context, the next step is to define why customers actually choose to play at your casino. What is it about your business that makes it unique and how do you want to position yourselves moving forward? This is important as, at the end of the day, it’s quite easy to create a casino if you have everything else in place, but building loyalty is an altogether different challenge.

Building a product that sticks

Again, going back to my opening statement about iGaming being a generic industry, the key to making your brand stand out is identifying where it sits in any given market. Do you want to be the most trusted, the most innovative or the most local? Often, the key to answering this question is understanding market maturities and the needs and expectations of the customers within them.

In my experience, most customers have some pretty basic requirements. They want to have fun, kill time and, with a bit of luck, beat the system. If you can deliver on these fronts, your product will stick, and if you can’t, believe me you’ll hear about it quickly. If a customer is coming for fun and it takes them 10 seconds instead of five to get a session going, you’re already dead in the water.

‘Making clear decisions about who you want to be and what niche you fill is key’

The reality is that customers tend to kill off anything that doesn’t work optimally. As such, your product needs to function beyond a hygiene level. It needs to be really, really good and work towards the needs of the customer. It’s for this reason that having a strong brand alone is not enough; you also need a proven product that sticks and is positioned into your marketing.

Although the two things work in tandem, at LCKY Group our philosophy is always to build the product first and prove that it works before we go promoting our services to customers. Without having that in place, being a brand that people remember from TV doesn’t really mean all that much, as if you can’t also offer the experience to back it up, customers simply won’t stick around.

Predictable markets pay off

I think one of the trickiest things that licensed operators have to deal with is the fact that when customers are comparing their platform, they’re not just doing so with regulated brands, but with unregulated ones too. As such, there’s a relative cap in terms of what they can achieve in terms of innovation or promotional offers, and players will usually gravitate towards the better product.

Given customers don’t typically distinguish between licensed and unlicensed sites, businesses that operate in unregulated markets will always have the upper hand in terms of what they’re able to offer from an engagement and incentive point of view. The flip side to this, however, is that regulated markets are far more predictable, and this is important in terms of long-term planning.

When entering a regulated market, businesses will likely have a pretty good idea of how legislation is likely to evolve over time, and this can help them build up a pretty clear picture of whether their cost of operations will be sustainable when set against the lifetime value and CPA of customers. Core local knowledge is again key here, but even that can’t always prepare you for every outcome.

A few years ago, I could have made one of my biggest mistakes in this respect. I was pitching to the board about entering the UK because it was one of the biggest regulated markets in the world. Had things continued as they were, it was definitely a viable move for us, but I don’t think anyone could have foreseen how significantly the rules would change – so always expect the unexpected.

Learn from your mistakes

Providing you’ve done your market research, have the right people behind you and have both your brand marketing and a first-class product working in tandem, I think even in a generic industry like ours, there’s still scope for some level of differentiation. Making clear decisions about who you want to be and what niche you fill is key, as is working in a market you can accurately project.

Of course, even with all of these factors in place, things can still go wrong, and one underrated aspect of being a successful iGaming business is knowing when to cut your losses. Generally, when you’ve already had success in a market, there’s a tendency to believe you’ll easily be able to do so again, but holding that confidence in the face of contrary numbers can prove costly indeed.

One of the biggest learnings from my career is that you need to be willing to make tough decisions quickly. Sometimes, you can’t afford to wait for your quarterly budget before acting and just need to look at the KPIs and say, “this isn’t good enough, we need to stop.” If you can do that, you’ll minimise your losses in the markets that don’t work and have scope to focus on the ones that do.

So, bringing it right back around to my original point about a casino being a casino being a casino. While this may very well be true across the industry as a whole, if you can master all of the points I’ve outlined here, there’s still plenty of room for some casinos to be more successful than others!