YouGov: Is the industry ignoring potential female customers?

We read a fascinating article this month on the differences in the way that male and female jockeys are perceived by punters and trainers. It inspired us to look at whether there was also a gender divide in the way that the public perceives the wider betting industry.

Our YouGov SportsIndex service tracks perceptions of a wide range of betting companies and sites among the British public on a daily basis. We track each company according to 16 different metrics to enable us to build a detailed picture of the fortunes of both these companies and of the sector as a whole.

The level and volume of data we collect also allows us to segment it by a wide range of demographic filters, including gender (but also including age, education, location, income and social grade).

For the purposes of this piece we simply segmented our audience by gender to see whether there are significant differences in the way that men and women perceive the betting industry.

Our instincts told us that women would be less well-disposed to the industry but in fact the picture the data painted was more complex and nuanced than that.

To begin with, we found that men were around three times as likely to count themselves as a current customer of a betting company than women (for these purposes, that means having used a betting company in the past 30 days). But then a quick glance into a handful of high street betting shops would suggest that that’s no surprise.

And if that trend shows no sign of ending it is perhaps because of the sector’s advertising strategies. Our data shows that men are two-and-a-half times more likely to be aware of advertising from the betting industry than women. Of course, that’s partly because men are more likely to be sports fans, and that much of the betting industry’s marketing  is delivered through the medium of sports. But that doesn’t explain all of the difference.

Although men are about half as likely again as women to tell us they are sports fans, that’s nowhere near the differential between men and women noticing the industry’s advertising. Could it be that men are simply more receptive to the advertising of the industry?  Or could it be that the industry is not as effective as it could be in making its marketing appealing or noticeable to women? It’s probably a mix of both factors – and others.

Let’s park that discussion for a moment and look at the data we collect around Impression. This metric asks the public whether they have a positive or negative impression of the companies that make up our betting sector.

As we have discussed before in this column, the sector has recently been performing disappointingly against this measure. But when we split this data for gender, an interesting effect emerges.

Despite men being more likely to be a customer of betting brands, they are also more likely to hold a negative impression of companies in the sector. In fact, they are just under a third more likely to hold a poor impression of the sector overall.

This creates an interesting relationship insofar as something is happening which gives men a worse impression of the sector –  or conversely women a better impression – despite men being more likely to use it.

It’s worth adding finally that this kind of gender imbalance in perceptions of a sector is not uncommon. But it is always worth spending some time unpicking why it may exist and, of course, how it can be addressed. Perhaps that’s something we can look at in a future column.

Charlie Dundas is commercial director at YouGov Sport