In the ever-evolving world of online gambling, one trend has been around for nearly 20 decades: adopting a multi-brand strategy. We see industry giants and rising stars alike launching a wide range of related online casinos, bingo, and sports betting websites, each seemingly going after a particular slice of the player pie. But what drives this seemingly complex and complicated setup?
This article dives a little deeper into multi-brand expansion in online gambling. It unveils this concept’s advantages and challenges to understand the motivations of gambling operators and explore potential pitfalls.
A Personalised Experience for Online Casino Players
From the beginning of Internet casinos, operators understood that gambling is much more than spinning the reels at a video slot machine. Players seek a personalised experience and crave completely different gaming environments.
Slot players not only want a wide range of video slots but also a welcome bonus and promotions tailored to online slots. In contrast, true high-rollers seek exclusive VIP treatment beyond most platforms’ standard loyalty programmes. Generic interfaces and repetitive game selections are some of the main reasons players leave online casinos; this is where the multi-brand strategy comes in.
For example, operators might launch a brand that focuses solely on live dealer games and comes with a sophisticated atmosphere, while another website boasts a theme park atmosphere with casual arcade-style games for quick, lighthearted fun. It allows the same gambling firm to capture sets of entirely different player types, owning a larger market share than they would with a single-brand approach. In industry jargon, you refer to this strategy as sister sites since, despite catering to different market segments, all websites are related, like sisters.
A Diverse Portfolio Protects Against Brand Failure
Risk reduction is another reason that lets operators adopt the sister sites approach other than player personalisation. Like hedge fund managers build an entire portfolio by buying shares in various companies, gambling operators try not to put all their eggs in one basket.
Gambling brands can fail for many reasons. For example, online casinos can receive negative reviews from frustrated players who lost money, leading to a low online reputation. It is also possible that a website receives a penalty from Google, making it difficult (or impossible) to show up in search results and acquire new customers. Even worse would be an (accidental) trademark infringement leading to the immediate shutdown of the entire brand and its domain.
In all such cases, single-site gambling operators would go down alongside their flagship brand, whereas multi-brand firms could simply shift the focus to one of their other online casinos.
The Cost Benefits of Launching Multiple Online Casinos
Ultimately, one of the reasons multi-brand adoption becomes a no-brainer to gambling operators is the cost-benefit.
Launching a gambling website like an online casino is a costly undertaking. Brand owners must develop the platform, obtain a gambling permit, pay licensing fees to game developers, handle payment processing, provide customer support, conduct KYC checks, and run marketing campaigns. All this requires a substantial upfront investment, especially in regulated markets like the United Kingdom.
However, launching a second or a third brand isn’t nearly as expensive. Gambling firms can use the same licence they already obtained and reuse the core platform they developed for the first online casino. They won’t have to pay additional licensing fees for the games and can take advantage of processes already running smoothly, such as processing payments or running KYC verifications. In many cases, gambling operators even use the same customer support team for their additional brands.
The Arguments Against Multi-Brand Gambling Operators
Now that we’ve outlined all the benefits of multi-brand gambling firms, it’s time to shed light on the disadvantages of this approach. Running several online casinos or bingo websites is a good idea to capture different market segments as long as the owner can manage them. Unfortunately, history has shown this is not always the case.
Some gambling firms have gotten too ambitious in the past and launched not two or three but over 100 sister sites. Needless to say, managing so many websites is nearly impossible. As a result, a significant portion of the portfolio is “dead sites”, where the online casino is still accessible online, but the owner does not actively maintain it. This can be a frustrating experience for new customers because it’s not immediately clear whether the website they sign up with is supported or not.
Besides, running dozens of websites also means that the workload for the customer support team increases significantly. Unfortunately, not all gambling firms hire more service agents when launching new brands, resulting in longer response times and overall poor customer service.
This article was written in cooperation with Eric Phillips