Where did it go? The fun, that is.

Using an extreme then-and-now comparison, during the start of what might be called the modern era of casino gaming that began in the early 1940s with the opening of the first legit Las Vegas Strip casino-resorts, casinos were reasonably scarce in number, small but edgy, personable, naughty and outright sexy, these perhaps the quintessential adult native environments for fun. If you were not there for fun, you didn’t belong.

Fast forward, today’s casinos are legal, numerous, accessible to just about everyone, and bigger, badder, better edifices of their birthrights—admittedly generating more fun in aggregate as a noun but perhaps less fun as a verb for certain players individually. Hence the title.

We can argue about what was better or worse, more or less fun, but if there is indeed some fun to put back into casino gaming that would accretively generate more visitors, profits and continued expansion of casino gaming, then the opportunity is worth exploring. This article will attempt to do just that.

Step 1: Align the Company/Casino Goal Set

All casino companies and casinos talk about being committed to their customers. Not all, however, are committed to it as honestly, irrevocably, and/or holistically as they should be where “it” is defined as:

• Conceptualizing, producing, and delivering target guest experiences (TGEs) that meet or exceed the needs, wants and expectations (NWEs) of each and every customer in your optimal target market segment mix (optimal TMS mix) at a price/cost that creates a real or perceived value, niches/beats the competition, and meets or exceeds the goal set—i.e., being customer-centric.

For fun to have to be “brought back,” it had to be allowed to “leave.” Admittedly, there can be valid reasons to allow it to leave—surviving the financial crisis one recent good example. But absent such outlier events, for fun to be brought back, its potential to be fully unlocked and sustained…

Customer centricity must be embedded as one of the top independent goals in your casino’s goal set, and then interdependently linked to your financial and non-financial performance goals so that both must always be considered and simultaneously optimized.

The customer centricity goal and performance goal are the two dominant cause-and-effect forces that lead to the sustained success of a casino. They are symbiotic and synergistic; one cannot optimally perform without the other, and both perform better when managed in combination.

Step 2: Establish the Institutional Foundation Needed to Bring Back and Sustain Fun

There is a need to declare, announce and initialize the fun. The goal should be declared and announced as a major, critically important undertaking.

The driving strategy to achieve this goal arises from the following observation: Casinos serve hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of customers a day, but they do so “one customer at a time.” For each customer, it should both feel and be that way.

But modern-day casinos send unintended signals that they may be more interested in attracting large volumes of patrons and then processing the collective “them” than serving and satisfying “me” individually.

Consequently, the driving strategy is to make customer service:

• First, “It’s about me!” individually;
• Second, “It’s about them” collectively, not vice versa.

The process to achieve the strategy is not complicated. De-construct each individual, grouped, and collective target guest experiences (TGE) generated by your casino and then where there is an opportunity, re-construct those TGEs to create and foster an “It’s about me!” environment.

The remaining foundation elements needed to support the “Bringing back the fun!” initiative follow:

De-Institutionalizing

Regardless of whether a single entrepreneur like Bill Harrah, a tribe, or a publicly traded company, the owner must make a passionate commitment to “It’s About Me!” That commitment must be evidenced in practices and deeds that continuously rise and break through the noise of business and so they can be heard externally by the public, internally by your employees, and ultimately and most importantly individually by each gaming and/or non-gaming customer.

Humanizing and Human Scaling

Walking into a building of any type with a million or more square feet is intimidating. Walking into a large, mega, meta-sized casino that serves upwards of 80,000 people a day is even more so. The challenge is to capture the benefits of size as your casino gets larger without making your customers feel overrun, unimportant, and insignificant—i.e., the absolute need to humanize your casino and make it about me.

Personalization

Casino TGEs are complicated to conceptualize, produce and deliver. The tendency has been to stamp them out in a relatively small number of variations in large number, e.g., X-dozens of blackjack tables or Y-hundreds of slot machines. Your casino might be able to more personalize these options following one or more of the following principles.

• Personalizing Playing Areas to Player NWEs

Players typically first determine what table game or type of slot machine they want to play and then go find it. But the information players need to decide where, what, and how to play is largely absent. In all, playing areas and environments could be more varied and personalized and more help provided to the player in finding the right area, game, and machine.

• Personalizing Service to Player NWEs

The obvious method to increase personalized service is to add staff. But after a decade of listening to the beat of the cut! cut! cut! expenses mantra, scored and published during the financial crises, arguing for more staff can still be a hard slog and worse, a career killer. Even so, the burden should be on those who refuse to show why well-researched and thought-out proposals to extract incremental revenue are not probed to determine if they can produce an accretive net increase in earnings, even if they add labor.

• Personalizing Casino Marketing Perks and Benefits

Excepting VVIP and VIP players, for all remaining players receiving a perk or benefit from a casino can be an amazingly institutional, inflexible and impersonal exercise, about as much fun as receiving your airline loyalty club statement in the mail. How to personalize service for the other 97 percent to 99 percent of your players is the challenge. Part of the cry for fun to return might be a desire to be recognized and awarded in an earnest, personal, and human manner.

• Personalizing Price/Cost/Value to Players’ NWEs

First, a visit to a casino must be affordable. Once determined to be affordable, the TGEs must create a real or perceived value in the mind of your customer. But determining the actual price/cost/value of casino gambling is complicated, the nuances of which go beyond the interest and training of most adults. Casinos must ensure that not only is fun delivered, but its customers know or perceive value was received.

Step 3: Bringing Back (and Adding New) Fun

This section presents an array of ideas and programs that have the potential to achieve the “Bring Back the Fun!” goal.

First, an introduction to value. A fun experience must ultimately be translated into some sense of value received for a player to conclude at the end of a casino visit that they enjoyed the trip, want to return, and will speak highly of the experience to others. The value of a casino visit to a player is typically evaluated in terms of both time spent value (time value), from a finite amount of personally available free time; and dollar spent value (dollar value) from a finite amount of personally available disposable income relative to this casino visit, visits to other casinos, other gambling options, and other free time and disposable income options.

Casinos need to increase involvement when playing the game or machine.

Efficiency initiatives have reduced player involvement. It may be time to consider the possible elasticity of allowing cards to be handled, removing the shoes on card games, putting the “ka-chunk” or its equivalent back into playing slots, allowing coins to be played in machines (putting them in and hearing the payout as they hit the tray), encouraging free play credits to be converted to cash (to be felt/touched and shown to others), and the like.

This is not a suggestion to return every everything back to the way it was in the ’50s and reversing all of the efficiency gains. Rather, it is a suggestion to consider something like a nostalgia pit of, say, six to 12 games and/or a nostalgia slot area of 25 to 50 machines that returns player involvement in one or more ways to test customer reaction incrementally and evolutionarily.

It is also not to say the price/cost of playing that game/machine has to stay the same. Adjustments may need to be made to retain financial performance.

It behooves a casino to always promote a sense of winning by ensuring that by the end of a casino visit the player leaves a winner, has been a winner, and/or has seen other players win sometime during their visit.

The larger casinos have become, the more difficult this has become. The taller the slot machines, EGM, ETG, progressive meters, and signage in general, the more difficult it becomes to see, hear or feel a sense of winning. Good physical configuration and sight lines, use of light/sound and technology to act as proxies of winning and winners, and use of video and vid-walls to announce/track winners can be part of the process of creating and promoting a sense of winning. Existing tracking technology can be expanded to cover more games, machines and areas and more visual/audio ways of projecting “winning” sprinkled around the gaming areas and the casino. More conscious, proactive thought needs to be applied to promoting a sense of winning in modern-era casinos.

Some players complain that their playing time has decreased over the years. It has. This is due to casinos increasing game speed in a multitude of ways, most without informing the customers but not “hiding it” either, but not giving anything of value to the player in return.

Casinos may want to consider probing whether there is elasticity in giving back some of the playing time it has eroded away to select target market services. If they do so, casinos may want this time to promote this change, not hide it.

Casinos may even want to help players choose games and machines that are slower than their counterparts.

Note that another way to extend time value is to extend non-gaming time by providing indoor areas in otherwise “dead spots,” with couches and chairs, television sets, places to play cards with friends, and/or outdoors around a pool or overlooking a view for this purpose.

Encouraging use of dining, bar, lounge, entertainment, recreation, relaxation and other non-gaming activities will also add “time.” Doing so would amortize the casino playing time across a longer trip time and increase the time value in the process.

Perks, Discounts, Awards and Other Benefits

Loyalty clubs, signed comps, and/or property perks, promotions, and other benefits can be used to keep your property “sticky.”

Demand stimulation marketing initiatives, or DSMIs, have the potential to reduce the cost of a casino visit and thereby increase dollars-spent value—and/or, particularly when delivered human to human, have the potential to personalize and humanize the overall casino visit TGE, thereby increasing both time- and dollars-spent value.

Periodically, but definitely when conducting a “fun audit,” it would benefit most casinos to take a zero-based review of the efficacy of current DSMI personalization initiatives and to probe the elasticity of deepening and broadening the use of them.

Increase Human Contact With Your Customers

Except for the VVIPs and VIPs where human-to-human contact is still high, the personalization of giving perks, discounts, awards and benefits has been slowly but relentlessly eviscerated by technology and other efficiency initiatives. For many, the fun of interacting with a real casino exec, host or representative is missed.

Casinos would do well to periodically take a zero-based review of their human-to-human protocols to see where more human involvement would be accretive.

Create Physical Environments that Align Player with NWEs

For time immemorial, casinos have been conceptualized and configured essentially as “one big room.” As casinos have gone from small to meta-sized, the utility of this approach has been strained. Primarily because, as currently executed, most large main casino areas are homogenous, they do not provide a sufficiently diverse range of activities and/or environments to align with the diverse and changing NWEs of your customers. Secondarily, as exciting as a large casino can be when full, as utilization decreases and more “empty-ness” results, the effect becomes increasingly off-putting just as it does with an empty restaurant.

In most casino situations, there should probably always be a “main casino” with non-gaming activities around the perimeter and a casino bar in the center, albeit perhaps not as big or as single-purposed as prevalent today.

Along with the redefined “main casino” area, it may be time to think about opening a mix of multiple mid-sized self-contained areas and smaller areas with adjacent or nearby non-gaming support. These areas should be retrofitted to accommodate in-house food, beverage, ticket, and other delivery options to be self-sustaining.

Besides size, each of these areas should have varying degrees of flexibility in terms of permanence and usage. Permanent areas might not change but every three to seven years. Multi-use areas would allow use by a limited number of activities/environments without a major overhaul. “Flex” areas would be designed to be changed frequently—i.e., ranging from, say, quarterly to several times per day. Ideally, management should have 25 to 50 environments in which to develop TGEs that align to differing customer NWEs.

Not an exhaustive list of possibilities by any means, but as illustrations of what the above approach portends, think about…

• “Permanent” area efforts that already include a single main casino floor with sub-areas allocated within or adjacent to high-limit areas, VIP rooms, Asian, tournaments, and party pits concepts. When downsizing, thought could be given to replace gaming with non-gaming bars, lounges, places to eat, informal entertainment staging areas, rotating “retail kiosks,” and just plain furniture to relax and socialize. Today, there is little that does not mix well with gambling.
• “Midi” and “small” areas could be developed around such themes as other cultures, micro-immigration cultures, feeder market country cues, exotic destination “escape” themes, music and movie themes, club-like environments, e-gaming/casino hybrids, generational (one for each of the five current generations of gaming age today), holidays, sports, haute couture, and as many other demographic/psychographic/market segment cues that can be thought of.
• Areas could also be developed around “softer” environments and activities: e.g., for those who want to escape, relax, socialize, or be able to be loud and raucous while watching sports, races, or music videos.
• Stadium seating with everyone facing a center focal point could be expanded to be habitat-like cubes facing multiple directions, and/or developed even more vertically, taking a cue from the Lan Kwai Fong Entertainment Area in central Hong Kong where over 100 dining, bar and club outlets rise upward from a rather small footprint with balconies overlooking every perimeter—interlocking the energy and magnifying it.
• Some areas traditionally viewed as single-purpose might be designed to be more flexible, such as meeting rooms, exhibition areas, day/night clubs, showrooms, pool/outdoor decks and patios, and hotel suites.

Increase Socialization

Much of the adjunct fun of gaming is socializing and/or people watching people. This behooves a casino to provide the means to direct a player to where similar players are gambling, to find opportunities to play together with friends, family or a date, and to find areas where other people are simply aggregating.

A data app could be modified, geofenced to your casino perimeter following popular and accepted protocols to further people-meeting-people. Anyone participating would have to opt in, but there is no reason these days for two lonely people to be alone or a casino not to enhance people meeting other people.

Socializing can also be physically promoted by providing places to socialize. More chairs, couches and coffee tables, mini-areas where games are intentionally slowed down a bit so people can talk a bit, announcements of “mixers” taking place rotating in and around the casino, a dance floor in the main casino area, and more social dining, drinking, music, dancing and mixed gambling configurations will subtly reinforce socializing as well.

Price/Cost/Value; ‘Truth in Pricing’

It may be time to consider rethinking how casinos price and “cost” gaming TGEs, share critical price/cost information with players, and how doing so impacts the customer’s sense of real and perceived value of a given or multiple casino visits.

The means exist to provide all of the information a new or seasoned player needs before the start of their trip to help set their gaming NWEs and budget, help them manage their trip in progress to adjust their gaming to help achieve their NWEs based upon actual results, and at the end of their trip accurately and validly determine the real price/cost of the casino visit so they can accurately determine the value received.

In short form, all of this would be accomplished via a system and app that may be referred to as a “truth in pricing” game/bet optimizer, finder, and manager. Players could enter their gaming/gambling NWEs with respect to “playing to win” vs. “playing to win to play” objectives, this visit dollar and playing time budget, and other NWEs so that the system could show players their best game/bet options and betting styles that optimize meeting expectations.

The objective would be to better align the fun of playing to the financial expectations of the player. Intuitively, there appears to be enough upside, perhaps substantial, to make that work worthwhile.

Employ Technology and Systems to Connect and Leverage the Initiatives

There is a real opportunity to further leverage and multiply the benefits of a fully executed “It’s About Me!” environment via a system that expands on technology already in use today, so the system dynamically connects everyone with everyone else, every activity, and everything in real time.

Capability-wise, the truth-in-pricing module and capabilities become an essential part of the system for reasons already explained. Once placed in the system, it could go beyond providing truth in pricing information. For example, upon arrival, the system could direct the player to open table or slot machine options that meet their parameters (including both areas and environments), allow them to reserve the gaming position to make sure it is available when they get there, and provide the ability to plan and reserve all of a trip’s non-gaming activities (e.g., meetings with friends/family/dates, send alerts for starts of shows booked or your table is available at a club).

The app could and should be downloaded to the player’s mobile device to allow remote or proxy betting, partake in other forms of e-gaming, race and sports betting and the like, where legal. The mobile device would facilitate the aforementioned deliveries in and around the casino.

Video streaming would be a critical part of the system generated by an array of fixed video cameras that would show dozens of images where public activity can or is taking place, augmented by a roaming casino 24/7/365 video team streaming “up-to-the-minute news.”

Opening/closing times would be posted for everything, and people density would be shown using such things as heat maps to see where the action is taking place in real time.

Ideally, every bet on every table and on every machine would be monitored, tracked and displayed in a manner that promotes a sense of winning in real time.

All of the existing loyalty club protocols would be subsumed into the system. There would be no reason why a player would miss a perk/award to which they are entitled or miss any activity if used properly.

Added to the system would be a back-of-the-house, purposed personal customer service tracking and support module. Essentially, customer service standards would be established and human-to-human contact would be tracked to make sure it is proactively delivered and player requests for contact are responded to in a timely manner.

There is more to discuss the system, but the point to remember is that the system has the potential to extract the maximum potential from the total environment approach to meeting or exceeding the NWEs of every customer, every visit.

The underlying theme of this article is that there is always room for more fun for players and non-players alike. This article provides some pathways to uncovering it. Go forth and make more fun. Never stop. And, don’t ever let anyone take fun from your casino again!