In 2014, Informed Decisions Group, Inc. (IDG) partnered with the Ohio Lottery to help them determine who was playing their various games so they could create a new media campaign targeting each group. We completed an online survey and respondents were screened to ensure they were age 18+ and not opposed to playing the Lottery.
Informed Decisions Group, Inc. leveraged multiple sources to identify market segments that would simultaneously satisfy and balance competing business objectives. Given the complexity and immense demand put on segmentation systems for greater insights, the multi-platform segmentation approach has several advantages, including:
- The balancing of multiple platforms representing different business uses and objectives
- The ability to analyze data that are on different scales of measurement (e.g., yes/no responses, ratings scales, Max/Diff and categorical data)
- The ability to apply the strongest mix of analytics to develop the segments, on a platform by platform basis.
This approach integrated strategic and tactical information ensuring that the results enabled both locating target groups through channel and demographic types of data and presenting them with persuasive messages and relevant offerings based on the attitudinal, branding and needs information captured by the survey program.
We were able to identify five unique segments. We then conducted in-depth interviews in order to employ laddering. Laddering is a technique grounded in the Means-End Theory developed by Dr. Tom Reynolds and Dr. Jonathan Gutman. This allowed IDG, Inc. to truly understand consumer decision making to position brand(s) and link what is important to consumers; and more importantly WHY it is important.
By creating an individual segmentation for each platform then fitting the platforms together in multidimensional space, a single, integrated segmentation solution was derived that showed greater discrimination between the segments.
Treating each platform individually produces more stable segments as compared to relying on only one analysis forcing all of the variables in each platform together, which yield a “watered down” solution.
During this study not only were we able to identify smaller market segments that generally would be ignored, but we were also able to match each market segment with the type of game play they would be most likely to partake in e.g., (gamers’ preferred Mega Millions, high dollar scratch-offs or the Pick 3 or 4). This research proved to be very effective for creating and implementing a highly successful multi-media advertising campaign that surpassed expectations and delivered an 18% increase in instant ticket sales.
Cleveland.com, the website of Northeast Ohio Media Group, published an article by Karen Farkas about what IDG, Inc. did for the Ohio Lottery. Read the article here to learn more about the unique segments we identified and why each group plays. To receive more posts like this, subscribe to our blog on the right.