There’s something luxuriating about walking into a casino and being greeted with the smell of fresh carpet and the ringing sounds of slot machines dropping pennies (even though they stopped using those little things long ago). It’s not entirely by accident either; casinos are designed to make us feel a certain way. They employ all sorts of tricks and methods to keep us inside, gambling the night away.
Like Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls a few years later, Scorsese’s Casino savors the viciousness of Vegas life, but also expresses an ambivalence about its demise. The movie even includes a torture-by-vice sequence that had to be carefully edited and sound-designed to avoid an NC-17 rating. Yet even as the story depicts the decline of the town, the film’s main character, Ace Rothstein, is fully committed to his casino career.
For a long time, marketers have relied on demographic information about their audience members to predict what they will do in a casino. But while that information is helpful, it doesn’t tell you why people come in the first place or how to get them to come back. In order to understand why people are attracted to your casino, you need to know what job they’re hiring it to do. To do that, you need to understand their emotions and how your casino can amplify them. That’s why in this article, we’ll explore tried and true strategies to boost your casino’s discoverability and turn it into a Vegas powerhouse.