Is Brand Awareness Key To Customer Loyalty In The Sportsbook and Online Casino Gambling Market?

Before discussing the impact of brand awareness on customer loyalty, we thought it might be beneficial to the reader to define the terms used in the question. Brand loyalty is generally understood as the level of familiarity consumers have with a product or service – how aware your target audience is of what you are trying to sell them. Customer loyalty, on the other hand, is the likelihood of a customer continuing to interact with your business long-term.

The general perception of the link between these two marketing elements is that the better a company’s brand awareness, the more likely customers will be loyal to it. The way brands try to accomplish this usually is to build familiarity with their customers by having a consistent presence in their lives via marketing tools such as social media campaigns and direct email messaging.

Gambling Markets

A recent article written by igaming business online uncovered a collection of insights about this topic gleaned from research on several gambling markets, including a Canadian province. Their research, which questioned a variety of customers, first asked all respondents to their survey to list all the brands that came to mind when thinking about online sportsbooks and casino operators. This part of the research was to establish a ranking of brands in terms of customer awareness.

The respondents in answer to this question identified five key organisations. These were DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars and Barstool.

To measure customer loyalty, the researchers surveyed brand app usage and their interaction preferences, such as how often respondents used each app and which ones they used for which services. In addition, the survey asked them to rank each app in its performance in certain key areas, such as user interface and which apps were their favourite.

These two information-gathering techniques establish how aware customers were of their favourite betting providers and how loyal they were in their usage of each and why.

Apps

The first part of the study revealed that the three most recognisable brands were also the three most frequently selected as the first app used. However, when considering the correlation between a bettor’s first app and their favourite app, research showed an interesting story about the shift in app preference from DraftKings to FanDuel overall. Indeed, 35% of all respondents in this cohort first used the DraftKings app, but 32% listed it as their favourite.

This is compared to the 28% of respondents that listed FanDuel as their first app used but 33% that listed it as their favourite (a net win to FanDuel of +8 percentage points compared to its biggest rival).

Somewhat predictably, when analysing this cohort of bettors’ app preferences, user interface and user experience were most important in deciding users’ favourite app (36%) – the category in which FanDuel happens to rank highest.

Interestingly, according to this study, a “strong brand name”, where Caesars and Barstool ranked first and second, respectively, was tied as only the fourth-most important in deciding a favourite app, listed by 7% of bettors.

Conclusion

If this research shows us anything, it is that customers aren’t looking for one app or service that can fulfil all their needs but that they hop around platforms and providers for different services depending on their use. In a sense, they are only temporarily loyal to various platforms and are always looking to optimise their experience, even if that means peripatetic gambling habits.

That being said, the numbers, in many respects, do reflect the opinion that if you have significant brand awareness, you are likely to have customers use your products more often.

In summation, customer loyalty is significantly impacted by brand awareness. However, user experience and product quality are very important, too, especially considering that customers seem to have no issue switching brands depending on their needs.