Consumers are encountering more and more digital connectivity in their daily lives, from cashless payments and data-driven personalization to the use of voice-enabled services and smart home assistants. Along with familiarity comes the expectation that businesses of all kinds provide an ideal, digitally-connected experience that serves their needs like never before.
To assist lotteries in meeting this challenge, IGT is developing a vision of Connected Play along with products and services to advance lottery via engagement with digital touchpoints. While lottery is still an analogue journey in many markets, the aim is to help customers prepare for what’s ahead and identify the path that lotteries can take to expand and optimize their digital presence.
Simply adding tools or gadgets to the current player experience isn’t enough. What specific types of connected experiences are most important to current and potential players? Which are most likely to prompt new interest in lottery? These were some of the questions behind the first phase of IGT’s Connected Player global study, conducted in 2019 with research partner YouGov. The research builds on previous IGT world-player studies to inform product roadmaps that support lottery customers in delivering the connected experiences players want. And what better way to gain those insights than by testing concepts?
How Can Lotteries Best Connect?
IGT innovation teams created eight test concepts to help researchers understand which types of “connected lottery play” experiences might appeal to players and potential players. Corresponding use cases illustrate how advances in technology could impact consumer lottery-purchase behavior in the future.
The eight test concepts included:
• Three scenarios in which consumers use a smart home assistant such as Amazon Alexa to engage with the lottery brand;
• Three scenarios that provide players with a frictionless checkout experience;
• Two scenarios that give players more digitally-enabled personalization in game play and rewards.
Researchers shared the eight concepts in random order with more than 5,500 individual study participants in Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. to measure their ease of understanding and gauge the likelihood of trial.
Meeting Player Expectations
While some of the concepts might be ahead of their time or require a period of introduction in certain markets, the findings give insight into how players and potential players want to engage with lottery as day-to-day digital connectivity continues to evolve.
Among the findings from phase one of the research was that respondents who were extremely or very likely to try any one of the test concepts—a.k.a. the “intenders”—were also found to be intenders for an average of three or more of the other test concepts. The significant overlap among intenders across the eight concepts amounts to a homogenous “intender profile,” with similarities in the intenders’ demographics, use of technology, engagement with and attitudes toward lottery. With this in mind, lottery marketers could potentially use one campaign to market any of the test concepts to consumers who share the intender profile, rather than create multiple messages to market the different concepts.
Researchers also found that participants had a high ease of understanding across the concepts tested, indicating that lottery marketers and retailers would not need to dedicate significant effort, time, and money to explain them to potential players. Ease of understanding is aided by the fact that consumers are engaging in some of these types of activities and mobile functionality today as they purchase from and interact with other brands. The applications for lottery become an extension of what consumers are already doing, rather than requiring lotteries to educate and lead uptake.
The study further revealed that some of the eight “connected lottery play” concepts appealed to 5-10% of current non-players. While these percentages might seem small at first glance, they represent an opportunity for lotteries to grow their player base proportionally by offering the relevant experiences. There were also notable regional differences in the participants’ response to the concepts, likely driven by the lottery life-cycle or maturity in each, with Italy, Finland and the Czech Republic showing the most immediate interest.
To learn more about these and other findings from the first phase of the research, contact Gerard Caro, IGT Senior Director of Marketing Insights, at Gerard.Caro@IGT.com. Watch for the results of the second phase of the study to be released later this year.
New IGT global research tested a range of “connected lottery play” concepts, customized by country, to gain insight on how players want to engage with lottery as digital connectivity evolves.