Marketing a casino comes with challenges

CINCINNATI - When it comes to the new Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati, there’s a fine line between being a good customer and a problem gambler.

So marketing a casino is tricky:  Reaching people who want to have fun without focusing on anyone planning to risk the mortgage.

“It’s sort of like you’re selling a prescription drug,” said Chris Manolis, a marketing professor at Xavier University. “You’ve got to kick up the ethics side a bit and think about what you’re doing.”

That makes marketing a casino decidedly different from selling shampoo or diapers, where addictive customer behavior isn’t an issue. Like marketers of alcohol, who promote having a designated driver, and makers of cigarettes, who must put health warnings on their packages, casino marketers should tread carefully, Manolis said.

It’s a distinction that local casino executives take seriously, said Mike Warren, vice president of marketing for Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati, which opens to the public March 4.

“We hold ourselves to very high standards to how we market,” Warren said. “Any type of call to action, particularly mail pieces or promotional pieces, will include some responsible gaming resources.”

Caesars Entertainment, which will operate the new casino in downtown Cincinnati, has long been an industry leader when it comes to responsible gaming, said Laura Clemens, the Ohio Casino Control Commission’s director of government affairs and responsible gambling program coordinator.

“Each and every one of their employees is trained in responsible gambling,” Clemens said. “And they’ve got ambassadors on the floor on every shift to help if they overhear someone say, ‘Oh my gosh! I just lost my rent money!’ Or something like that.”

Actively targeting compulsive gamblers would be bad for the industry as a whole, said Sam Hui, an assistant professor of marketing at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University who studies entertainment marketing.

“You don’t care if someone goes to your movie 1,000 times,” Hui said. “But you might be concerned if you see someone who comes back to the casino every day.”

But in other ways, winning customers won’t be all that different for the new casino than it is for the Procter & Gamble Co., said Drew Boyd, assistant professor of marketing at University of Cincinnati.

Although Warren didn’t want to discuss a lot of the casino’s specific strategies, Boyd said there are basics that the marketing plan will have to cover.

The casino’s first priority should be luring customers from other nearby gambling venues and casinos, especially those in Indiana, Boyd said.

“Just based on their location, I think they are going to get their fair share – maybe even more than their fair share – instantly,” he said.

The second strategy should be tapping into Caesars’ Total Rewards customer loyalty program, Boyd said. Casino officials have said that program has more than 250,000 members within a 100-mile radius. Members of that program can get discounts at local partner hotels when staying in Cincinnati along with other perks.

“They will pick up regional loyal customers from as far as the East Coast,” Boyd said.

Boyd also expects to see the casino partner with other local sports and cultural events to help get more people in the door.

And, finally, the casino will have to go after the region’s “non-gambling” community to promote a couple hours of gambling as an entertainment alternative, he said.

Beyond those general strategies, casinos gather detailed data to figure out which types of customers to target.

Hui’s research has found that women gamble more than men, he said, and women are more likely to play slot machines than table games.

“From a casino’s perspective, that ‘s good because the slots cost less to operate and are very profitable,” he said.

Casinos also can use customer data to figure out which players are more skilled, Hui said.

Warren declined to disclose details about the casino’s advertising budget, direct mail strategy or the number of billboards it’s buying, saying those numbers are changing constantly. But he said all those efforts would certainly ramp up as the casino opens.

“Caesars Entertainment has really become well know for its ability to garner customer preferences and market directly to a customer,” Warren said. “That’s a very powerful use of marketing for any organization.”

Even with all that data, though, UC’s Boyd isn’t convinced the new casino will be able to draw the six million visitors it’s anticipating in its first year.

Warren is confident, however.

“It’s easy to sell the city of Cincinnati because there is such vibrancy to it and so much going on,” he said. “Being a part of that and partnering and co-marketing, I think we are well poised to reach that number.”