Client Context
A leading online gaming company was looking to grow their brand equity and move beyond marketing campaigns that just focused on promotional offerings to more targeted marketing strategies, including uncovering loyalty drivers among customers with the highest potential lifetime value.
The Business Challenge
Leaders in the online gaming industry have historically spent the majority of their marketing dollars on promotional offerings and specials, with budget going towards both the payouts themselves, and towards advertising campaigns centered around the promotions. Seeing a gap in the market, our client wanted to augment their current spending to include room for building brand equity and creating experiences that emotionally resonated with its customers. The hypothesis was that an investment in the brand would drive long-term loyalty, especially when coupled with great UX and enticing promotional offerings.
Capabilities Applied
- Driver Modeling
- Brand Equity
- Structural Equation Modeling
- Brand Loyalty
Approach
It was important to pursue this work efficiently, given the customer insights the team already had in hand. HawkPartners analyzed several waves of the existing brand equity tracker, which captured customer feedback across multiple product lines. Rather than focusing on tactical recommendations, we looked for higher-level themes in the rich data, which also included actual gaming behaviors appended to the surveys. Factor analysis enabled us to group 20+ brand attributes to create the themes, while structural equation modeling helped us understand which themes were driving preference and loyalty for our client’s brand – and how it differed for them compared to their competitors.
Impact
While promotional offerings were indeed strong predictors of loyalty and future use, the work also uncovered deeper emotional themes that were very important to some of our client’s most valuable customers. The findings helped brand leaders make the case for more brand-specific campaigns and provided specific levers for how and when to appeal to different types of customers. It also led the team to reconsider how to appeal to non-customers who are in the market for online gaming to help drive future growth. The team walked away from the engagement with the foundation for using the framework across other product lines as the business continues to expand in new markets/verticals.
