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When Smoking Bans Become a Competitive Advantage: Mitigation and Adaptation for Profit

Here’s a marketing strategy that I love to hate: capitalizing on smoking bans and casual gambling addiction to drive adoption of online bingo in the UK. Its awesomely detestable (combining so many deleterious vices), yet wonderfully insightful. In fact, I don’t dislike the strategy (see below) - just smoking.

The crux of the UnLuckyForSome.com’s (ULFS) plan is that smoking bans are going to drive millions of Britain’s bingo players online, where they can play bingo from home and (for the moment) smoke as they please. ULFS is a community site offering reviews & news, but more profitably, plenty of affiliate links and sign up bonuses. I’m guessing ULFS is positioned to make its owner some nice cash for very little investment in either time or effort.

The Mitigation & Adaptation Services Strategy

Point is: its a great strategy. Identify a change coming to a given market, determine who it will impact, see how you can provide either mitigation or adaptation services for them.

Mitigation: Is finding ways to reduce the impact of a change on a population. An example in this context might be a “bingo hall finder” that let’s users search for bingo halls in other jurisdictions where smoking is still allowed.

Adaptation: This is ULFS’s territory - helping users adapt to a change by offering them a path to a new behaviour.

I’m not into capitalizing on people’s smoking addictions, but I’m sure there are a million other equally good scenarios playing out every day.

adaptation, bingo, britain, mitigation smoking

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