Loyalty Typologies and Consumer Choice Factors in the Online Sports-Betting Industry: An Explorative Study into the Italian Regulated Market

Paolo Calvosa

doi:10.5539/ijms.v8n5p1

Abstract

<p>The paper analyses the loyalty typologies and consumer choice factors in the regulated online sports-betting industry. From the methodological viewpoint an empirical investigation has been carried out through the administration of a questionnaire towards customers who make sports bets on online gambling sites in the Italian regulated market. We have found that, in keeping with consumers’ behaviour “regularities” which normally characterize frequently purchased consumer goods markets, the number of customers who are exclusively loyal to one gambling website is rather limited and that, therefore, online bettors mostly adopt a “multi-brand” buying behaviour. In the markets in which this behaviour pattern emerges, customer loyalty programs appear less efficacious in increasing market penetration of the companies with respect to the firms’ decisions on marketing mix-inputs that influence consumer choice of purchasing. The empirical investigation has therefore permitted us to single out the factors that influence the decision to bet at one online gambling site over another, and to show how the importance of these factors varies in relation to the different degree of the gamblers loyalty. The results are then applied to marketing strategies of the online gambling operators.</p>

Highlights

In the last few years in the sphere of the marketing studies an increase has been recorded in the attention paid by scholars towards the theme of the influence of the Internet on the customers’ decision-making and consumption process
In order to analyse the various loyalty typologies which link the consumers to the gambling websites, the on line survey has firstly investigated the gamblers’ loyalty behaviour within the sphere of the regulated online sports-betting industry in Italy
The main result is that in the regulated online sports-betting market in Italy only a rather limited number (18.6 per cent) of the consumers is solely loyal to one online gambling site with respect to those who express a customer loyalty of another type

Summary

Introduction

In the last few years in the sphere of the marketing studies an increase has been recorded in the attention paid by scholars towards the theme of the influence of the Internet on the customers’ decision-making and consumption process. The Internet has introduced profound changes in the firms’ market strategies by reshaping competition in numerous industrial and service sectors. Among the sectors in which the Internet is strongly influencing the competitive strategies is included that of gambling. The utilization of the Internet as channel for the sale of gambling products, starting from the mid-1990s (Wood & Williams, 2007), has given life to a regulated online gambling industry characterized by competitive dynamics unlike those of the regulated land-based gambling industry. The online GGR has an influence of more than 9 per cent on total online and land-based GGR (H2 Gambling Capital, 2015)

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