GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 42 - October 2018

COVER STORY 1 The Law of Leadership Being first in the market is better than having a better product. If you can be first to market with a strong idea, you have a huge competitive ad- vantage. The catch is: When you’re early, what’s a good idea? For example, some years back, when enhanced odds were coming through, I heard about an affiliate who wanted to build an enhanced odds portal where he would become a focus point and thought leader in this area. Ultimately, it didn’t work, because in the end punters don’t think “enhanced odds free bets,” they just think “free bets.” This leads me to the winners who got in early enough and have dominated the free bet scene for years: freebets.com and freebets.co.uk. My point: It’s important to get in early, but it’s also important to get it right. The answer is a diversified portfolio of projects, where you understand the fundamentals of the ecosystem and can experiment with different emerging marketplaces. 2 The Law of Category It’s hard to gain leadership in a category with lots of competition. It’s difficult to beat incumbent brands. Another example is AskGamblers, which dominates brand searches with reviews pages. We all know brand searches are the high-converting phrases, because players have more or less made up their mind and now just want validation. AskGamblers owns this territory, and it would be very hard to usurp them. There are two choices in this situation: • Find a subcategory that doesn’t have a lot of competition, where you know you can lift the quality of the customer offer. • Create your own new subcategory. Once you’ve got your own little niche, you can build a brand and build re- sistance to other brands coming in on your territory. 3 The Law of the Mind It’s not necessarily important to be first in the market, but first in the mind of consumers. If you get your site ranked on Google and you are a new player on the scene, you become first in the mind of Google users, because you rank higher than the rest. That’s OK, but the catch is, you have to rank — and because of the way Google works around user engagement and satisfaction, if your site doesn’t de- liver what users actually want, you’re not going to rank. However, if you’re an operator and you have got a ton of cash, the law of mind is relevant because you could go out and do a massive amount of marketing to gain prominence. 4 The Law of Perception Marketing is not about products, features or quality, but about perception. One of my most-used expressions these days is, “Your truth doesn’t have to be true.” What is true to you is based on your perception of the world. This basic idea of “perceived truth” has a huge impact on marketing. For example, how many times have you looked at a dom- inant affiliate and thought, “Boy, this site is awful”? Perception is more important than re- ality. And since leadership is equated with the best, and consumers are slow G P W A t i m e s . o r g