Betting and gaming client

Issue

Concerned about growing calls for regulation or legislation to deal with ‘problem gambling’, one of Britain’s leading betting and gaming companies approached Populus with the brief of finding out how both the general public and those who gambled characterised the issue and where they thought the balance of responsibility for tackling the problem lay.

Solution

Populus conducted focus groups among non-gamblers, occasional gamblers and regular gamblers and then a poll among the general public to ascertain how people defined ‘problem gambling’, how prevalent and important they thought the problem was relative to other societal issues such as obesity and alcoholism and who they thought should be responsible for addressing it.

Outcome

Populus came up with firm findings which demonstrated that catch-all messages or restrictions aimed at reducing ‘problem gambling’ would be likely to prove ineffective since those they targeted wouldn’t consider themselves as having a problem. Populus also advised the client that it needed to find ways of demonstrating that its online customers were part of the mainstream who valued the convenience of the internet rather than a specifically vulnerable group who would not otherwise have gambled.