In this series, Catalyst will explore operational and strategic solutions to common marketing challenges. In this first installment, we will be discussing is how to best assess guest perception.
Before diving into the “how,” let’s talk a little bit about the “why”. What makes understanding guest perception so important? The casino industry is known for capturing great behavioral data about our guests. The data is so robust we are still working on ways to more easily visualize and actualize it. Behavioral data tells a great story about how guests have acted in the past and helps us model what they might do in the future. Missing from that is how they feel and how that might influence their intentions.
Gaining a better understanding of how they view, feel about and react to your property, services, promotions, entertainment, staff, messaging and overall brand can guide how to make decisions to improve those components to your operation.
Why is understanding guest perception important?
- It helps to determine what messaging will encourage the actions that are preferred
- It helps to determine what offers, promotions and prizes will drive the best response
- It provides data that drives media planning and helps determine the best tactics to reach guests
There are multiple ways to measure guest perception and behavior. Let’s look at the benefits and challenges to the most common methods.
Once you have decided to move forward with conducting surveys or focus groups, it is an important next step to think about what information is most important to get and how questions can be designed to uncover meaningful insights. Now the answer to those questions is in our secret sauce, but to share a bit, the questions are written as a mix of multiple choice, ranking, and open-ended, which are designed to determine:
- How guests and gamers in your market view your property and your competitors’ properties
- What factors influence their decisions
- What their preferred interactions are with yours and gaming properties in general
The final question is how to implement? Catalyst has a tried-and-true research process called CATapultTM that helps properties identify guest preferences and perceptions, determine what sets your property apart from your competition and how guests and gamers in your market view your brand. Since this method has been implemented with properties in markets all over the country, we have developed a baseline to compare properties nationally.
