Why the Financial Services industry should pay attention to Online Gaming

Why the Financial Services industry should pay attention to Online Gaming! Overlooking a cheap shot about the nature of futures trading (fun fact, invented by Hammurabi, sixth king of Babylon around 3700 years ago), these two industries on the face of it couldn’t be more different.

Compare the customer lifetime of a FinServ customer (measured in decades) to the average customer lifetime in Online Gaming, which of course would be dramatically different. Same for Customer Value if you think about it. Or consider the cadence of MarComms interaction. How often do you hear from a bank vs how often you hear from a gambling company?

This is all anecdotal of course, full disclosure, metrics on this are surprisingly hard to come by, but I’ve been around both industries long enough to be able to make an educated guess on the subject, and I’m sure you can also. After all, as the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”.

Two heavily regulated industries

The differences go on, but the one thing that unites both Financial Services and Online Gaming is they both tend to be the most heavily regulated industries in any country you’d care to look at, and it isn’t hard to see why – both are responsible for customers, their money and their wellbeing in a way no others industries can claim to, and to be irresponsible with that obligation would be to destabilise the very economy they exist within and because of.

However, we have reached that point in my diatribe where I suppose I should consider coming to the point.

I’ve made no secret over the years of my fondness for the creativity of the Online Gaming industry, in a vertical where the competition for share of the customers wallet is more fierce than any other, even retail, even now, in a vertical where customers can choose from dozens of providers each day to indulge their gambling pastime – that creativity for marketers is the lifeline that keeps you above water, keeps you one step ahead of your competitors.

Of course, there are some Grey market Online Gaming operators in the world who might not have the best interests of their customers at heart, and give the rest of the operators a bad name, but they come and go, and often their founders see the inside of prison cells for their unchecked avarice. To not take care of your customers after all is to court disaster.

From my personal perspective heading up the EMEA arm of a leading Marketing Automation Consultancy, the Online Gaming companies routinely stretch the systems and processes we support in the most creative and fascinating ways, all in the name of going one better than your competition – there are no prizes for second place in a wallet-race after all.

People, Processes, Data & Technology

These bleeding-edge aspects of the world of Online Gaming feed into every area of the sacred diamond of people, processes, data and technology that drive the modern marketing beast, and the more verticals that take those lessons on board, the better off they will all be.

The truly amazing thing about all that creativity deployed in the Online Gaming Marketing world is that it happens under the yoke of all that stringent regulation. Talk about doing your best work with a gun to your head…

How then to unravel the secrets of MarComms within a leading Online Gaming company? Well, my best advice would be to speak to the professionals, but failing that, you could always sign up to gaming companies’ communications, an astute marketer can reverse engineer the customer journeys from the communications they receive.

If you would like to find out more and how Purple Square can assist you, get in touch we would be happy to help you.

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