Should You Recycle Your Product or Brand?
While most businesses, in most industries, are focused on developing a strong brands that will attract and retain clients, some businesses take a different approach. In various niches, and especially ones that aren’t particularly socially acceptable, the way to increase your audience reach is through the creation of multiple brands. Companies who utilize such a strategy are willingly neglecting their first product, letting it die out naturally, and instead focus on a second product, and when the second product starts showing signs of saturation or erosion, they move on to the third product, and so on.
I’m not talking about cases like when Apple neglected the iPod in order to introduce the iPhone – I’m talking about company that simply re-brands its first product as is, perhaps with small adjustments but no major developments. The consideration for such a move is more than anything to put up something “new” in the market, that can create buzz and excitement simply because it’s newly introduced. Those who are most keen to try out something along these lines would be companies offering less-than-sophisticated or shelf products which are easy to adjust and tweak without serious development involved, and thus, this process is extremely smooth for them, with a minimal Time to Market.
Delving Into The Online Casino Industry
A prime example of this strategy can be found in the world of online casinos. Online casinos are shelf products in terms of software (you purchase a license from a provider), the only operational difficulty is with processing payments, building up a support and retention team, and above all – marketing. Once the online casino is set up it is a money-making machine with no real overheads for additional clients (only perhaps recruiting more manpower to handle the client volume).
Online casinos are difficult to brand. There are some exceptions to that like the publicly traded 888 or casinos that are ran by betting shops like William Hill or Coral, but generally speaking, there aren’t really prominent brands in this world. There’s a huge similarity between the offering of different casinos (considering there are less than 5 major software providers in this industry that everyone uses), and in most regions in the world it’s still borderline legal which prevents large-scale media campaigns, and thus – players get acquainted with new casinos simply via searching Google or reaching comparison websites.
Due to the nature of the product, which requires almost no development, and the fact branding is incredibly difficult to achieve, companies branch out by simply adding more brands into their selection. For instance Gaming Innovation Group LTD, the owners of Guts Casino and Betspin casino have recently launched a new casino named Rizk casino.
What do you they have to gain from such a move that basically recycles their existing offering under a new name (though the layout and sign up process is nicer than with their previous product, they could have easily implemented it there) ?
1) New product on the market. In the online casino industry players are looking specifically for new casinos as they have tapped out on all casinos they know of, and want to try something new. The experience of something new doesn’t indicate they are looking for additional games or additional offers, they are looking for simply a new place that could bring “new luck” with it.
2) Improving relations with affiliate websites. If affiliate product comparison websites are happy with the performance of the previous product, they would be eager to implement the new product in the comparison table. That means that another product will bring in twice as traffic to the same company from existing partners.
3) Players who were gambling in the first casinos and stopped can be targeted for marketing for the new product (as the company already have the contact details).
4) Improving the learning curve – when you have two similar products you can run a higher amount of product tests – you can run test A on product1 and text B on product2.
5) It costs you close to nothing. This one one key factor – if you already set up everything you need with your previous product, so why not launch a new one based on the infrastructure that you already built?
I hope this guide has been helpful and can help business owners understand the advantages of recycling their product or brands.