Aussie folk already love to gamble, and they love their online gambling on their horseracing, political elections, and even that weird game they play with a ball that looks like a football, but isn’t and where they tackle each other without pads.
They love betting online as much as they love drinkng and carryin on, just like the rest of us.
No wonder Centrebet is gearing up for what they’ve termed as ‘Project Rocket’. Earlier this week the company announced it would be funneling big bucks into a strategy to double it’s market share by 2015, that is if the world still exists after 2012, I guess they never took the Mayan calander into account in their planning. Assuming that life will in fact exist after 2012, Centrebet will invest around $50 million in new products to lure punters and in an effort to increase market share by a whopping 20 percent, putting Centrebet as the top dog bookmaker in Aussie land. If all goes as planned, the company would see profit skyrocket to over $32M in the same period.
Wow Centrebet, such big plans. But without a doubt, if it’s market share they want then spending the money to put their name out there is one way to go about it. The marketplace has become saturated in many areas like the UK and in places like Australia there are big players with capital and brand presence. The only way the eat up market-share is ingenuity, differentiation and solid brand management and advertising. You can’t just show up on the scene and expect to pull clients from thin air. In Australia, as soon as they relaxed advertising rules, immediately it served to benefit the business.
Now technology is being leveraged as the next way to gain an advantage. Centrebet knows the deal, the company plans to spend at least half its “Project Rocket” budget on marketing and advertising. In an article in the Australian, Merrill Lynch gambling analyst Nathan Gee agreed that Centrebet has an opportunity to take customers from the smaller bookies, but he wasn’t sure sure about the whole doubling of market share bit, his sense is that it is far from a foregone conclusion.
“The Aussie . . . market remains intensely competitive with a few large Aussie competitors who have the financial firepower to respond to Centrebet intensifying its marketing and product investment with their own,” he says in a note to clients this week.
