42 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 When Scientific Games VP of Strategic Marketing Jim O’Brien and a team of data analysts began developing the concept of an integrated family of For Life games in 2010, they didn’t realize how rapidly the concept would catch fire. By 2012, the company’s For Life families offered by top performing lotteries in the U.S. – Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania – hit a total of $1 billion in sales. The same as sales for standalone For Life games at 14 other lotteries combined. “For Life families were the first families that made a major impact,” says O’Brien. “Next was a multiplier family which started in Massachusetts at $1, $2, $5 and $10, and it exploded from there.” The idea to simultaneously launch an integrated family of games was bold. O’Brien’s concept went through rigorous game design, prize structure development and more analysis before reaching production. Over the next decade, he and the company’s analysts followed every nuance of how integrated families were positioned in customers’ portfolios so they could play off one another. Scientific Games focused on basic marketing principles in the marketing mix to develop a product line of integrated family of games: Product – All the products in a family had a consistent, core look and feel so consumers would easily recognize that they belonged together. Price – Each price point in the family offered unique entertainment value to the consumer. Highlighted callouts drive home the special prize attributes featured in the games. Promotion – The family could be effectively advertised by lotteries and understood by consumers. Place – The position of the family in the lottery’s total game portfolio at retail. Geared to one basic concept, O’Brien explains that families transition players up the price point ladder to try an already familiar product at a higher price point. “A family of games also makes the use of advertising dollars more efficient. One simple ad campaign sells all the games in the family, and this has been demonstrated time and time again by the top lotteries in the country,” says O’Brien, who was former Director of Marketing for the Massachusetts Lottery where his mathematical formulas and breakthrough marketing strategies were credited with revolutionizing the industry’s instant scratch game business. In fiscal year 2022, families of games produced by Scientific Games generated $4.78 billion in revenue for U.S. lotteries – 72.2% of all revenue generated by families of games.
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