Q&A: How the Buzz Bingo rebrand is causing a stir among younger players

In May 2018, Gala Leisure undertook a massive £40m rebranding exercise, following the sale of Ladbrokes Coral Group’s retail clubs to Caledonia Investments in December 2015. In a press release at the time, Gala Leisure said it hoped the re-launch would “re-energise local communities and reignite the allure of bingo and the buzz of playing”.

At the same time as the club rebrands, the firm also launched its online platform buzzbingo.com in September last year. The omnichannel platform, which has no-wagering requirements, is accessible via mobile, tablet, desktop and on-premise in Buzz Bingo clubs via Touchpads.

In October 2018, Buzz Bingo launched a new advertising campaign with creative agency isobel across TV, social media and digital to appeal to the younger generation of bingo players. At the time of the campaign launch, Paul Houlding, founder and creative executive at isobel, said: “This campaign was a beast of a challenge. We have worked on a number of gambling brands but with Buzz we felt it was so different – they are genuine people interested in giving their customers a wonderful, playing together experience. Combine that with the customers themselves. Their enjoyment of the game and their appetite for fun is contagious and we want to convey that properly.”

A year on from the start of the rebrand process, Buzz Bingo appointed Jamie Queen as its new chief commercial officer in a newly created role. Joining from Thomas Cook, Queen has been tasked with overseeing all marketing communications for the brand, as well as its food and beverage operations, gaming and bingo propositions.

Prior to joining Buzz, Queen was group marketing director for Thomas Cook and has held roles within marketing, ecommerce and digital over the last 16 years. Having worked in the financial services sector prior to joining the gambling industry, Queen recognises the similarities on the regulatory side as well as the importance of resilience from his time in the travel sector.

EGR Marketing talks to Buzz Bingo’s new CCO about his move into the gambling sector, the rebrand of Buzz Bingo and how its new online platform is performing.

EGR Marketing: How have your first few months at Buzz Bingo been?

Jamie Queen (JQ): Yes, it has been great. Buzz Bingo is a brilliant business. It’s got some fantastic people in it and there are some really unique relationships between our club colleagues and our customers.

It’s been great to see how our rebrand has performed and how that’s been rewarded recently by EGR and WhichBingo. It’s fantastic to see how the efforts that have been put into the rebrand have borne fruit and delivering an external recognition, which I think is important for a business like Buzz Bingo. The first two months have been a really great experience focused on learning more about the business, meeting our colleagues and our customers and getting some time out in clubs, which is really important for me having not come from a gambling background before. It’s been good to gain an understanding about our regulatory framework, how that affects the way that we communicate with customers and how we deliver that through our product.

EGR Marketing: Has it been a change moving from the travel sector to the gambling industry?

JQ: Yes, but I think there are lots of similarities too. I suppose my career has given me some opportunities to work in financial services and in travel, leisure and hospitality. So, there are lots of similarities between the gambling industry and financial services from a regulatory perspective.

In terms of Thomas Cook versus Buzz, I think in my early time at Thomas Cook, one of the things you have to learn is resilience. The travel industry is affected by all sorts of external events like weak currency, ash clouds, geopolitical issues and terror attacks. You wake up one morning and find that there’s been a terror attack and customers are involved in it. That changes your entire day, week and month. Your focus has to move entirely on to ensuring those customers and your colleagues in that place are safe. I’m not sure most people realise just how challenging it is to work in travel.

Some of the similarities are really important – the need for customer focus. And typically, in a business that’s faced some challenges in terms of its relevance over time, I think customer focus and ensuring that we keep delivering what customers need and want rather than just what we as an industry has done is very important. That’s definitely something that needs to be taken from my experience at Thomas Cook.

At Thomas Cook, when I first joined, we had 850 shops so there’s a lot of retail omnichannel similarities in the way that Buzz Bingo operates.

EGR Marketing: What have been your main priorities as CCO at Buzz Bingo in terms of marketing?

JQ: So, this is the first time Buzz, or even as Gala Leisure, has put product and marketing together. It’s early days for me to give you a sort of view on what we’ll do with our marketing or what direction it will go in. For me the priorities have been to understand the role of product. Product for us is bingo, how the bingo game works, how we deliver that to customers both in club and online, how our slots product works, and how our machines and arcades work both physically and digitally.

My priority has been to really understand that and spend time with our colleagues and my team understanding that. From a marketing perspective, it’s about understanding how we can bring together great product and then deliver great marketing to support it. I think if you look at famous advertising campaigns or marketing campaigns, in most cases that starts with great product. And it starts with a great product that meets a customer need, which is actually then delivered through brilliant advertising.

EGR Marketing: What experience have you brought with you from your time at Thomas Cook?

JQ: Earlier on in my time at Thomas Cook, I was responsible and accountable for ecommerce in the UK business. So, the ecommerce understanding is something that’s really important for Buzz at the moment because a proportion of the growth across the business is coming through digital and it’s great to see how those are performing.

And then we’ve touched on customer experience. There is an opportunity to bring much more customer insight into the gambling industry. Particularly in our sector of bingo machines, food and beverage and retail and online experiences, it’s about bringing that customer experience and customer insight into product development so that we produce great products that customers love, and then we advertise them and use the brand to bring them to life.

EGR Marketing: What are the main challenges and opportunities you face as CCO of an online gambling firm?

JQ: I think the opportunity is in some ways to do more of what we’re great at. We’re brilliant at having unique relationships with our customers. There are very few retailers that you can go into and see the same level of interaction and personalised conversations. And for me that’s a big opportunity. We’re already doing that brilliantly and how can we do that even better? How can we do that more? How can we bring that face-to-face experience into our omnichannel and digital strategy? We’re already doing great work with our chat rooms and the way that we interact with our customers on our website. But how can we bring that really personal feel and an authentic experience that we have with our retail customers through our omnichannel strategy and into our digital interaction? I think that that’s a big opportunity for the business.

EGR Marketing: Can you tell me more about the recent rebranding process from Gala Leisure to Buzz Bingo? Why did you choose the name and what is your new brand message?

JQ: Buzz and the essence of the brand comes from the fact that this is an industry that lacks customer authenticity and trust. Trust is low in this category overall. So, the brand was designed to be slightly playful, energetic but actually genuine, putting community at the heart of everything we do. And when we rebranded our clubs, we really took the opportunity to focus on that community element. Each opening of the Buzz Bingo clubs was done by a member of the local community, one of our customers, and that really helped celebrate the community element of these clubs.

But there’s two messages that underpin our brand communications. Online, we’re really very proud to have no wagering requirements and that underpins our simple approach to user experience or customer experience. And then the second part of our brand proposition is that you can play together anywhere and that’s really important. Customers, whether they choose to play with us online, in retail or in our clubs, or whether they choose to play in a combination of both, whether they choose to play on mobile, or desktop. All of that is customer choice. Underpinning our brand is the ability that you can play together anywhere. We’re not just saying omnichannel is part of our strategy, we are truly delivering an experience which meets a customer need, at whatever point they are in their journey.

EGR Marketing: Has the rebrand helped to attract the younger generation of players to play bingo?

JQ: I’ve been very impressed by the extent to which our rebrand and the launch of buzzbingo.com has driven a younger audience into our clubs and online. It’s very impressive. Having said that, are we doing enough as a business? And is the industry doing enough as a whole to challenge ourselves on what the right experience is and how to innovate bingo? No, I think I share Stevie’s view that we need to be more innovative and we need to challenge ourselves. Bingo is a game that’s centuries old. But actually, there’s been lots of different versions of that game produced over history and we need to challenge ourselves to constantly produce a product which is right for the customer. I think we need to do that and that is an opportunity.

I think we’re doing a much better job than I expected externally of driving the younger generation into bingo and I think the rebrand has had a lot to do with that. Do we need to do more? Yes, the industry and Buzz Bingo need to do more to challenge ourselves to develop products, which meet the needs of the younger generation.

I think social experiences are increasing, leisure spend is increasing and bingo should form part of a leisure activity for people.

EGR Marketing: Where do you see the most value in terms of advertising campaigns with regards to different channels eg. TV, social media etc?

JQ: For driving our online business, TV is clearly an important part of the communication mix.

My personal view on channels and marketing to people – around whether TV is the right choice or whether social media is the right strategy – is that I’m a media planner more than I am a creative. I would focus on who the target audience is, what’s the best message to serve them and which channel to do that in. I think there is an opportunity for Buzz to use that insight of where our customers are, what they spend their leisure time doing, and then talk to them in the right tone of voice, the right language, and ensure that we target the right customer with the right message at the right time. That’s a bit cliched but the reality is that’s what we need to do.

Talking to a retail customer about going into a club will require a different type of marketing than talking to an online customer going on to buzzbingo.com to play, and we need to evolve our marketing strategy so they can do both those jobs.