Rank Group the parent company behind Grosvenor casinos and Mecca bingo is to resort to a new market research plan in order to understand its customers. The gaming giant is sending some executives into customer’s homes to probe daily habits of its customers. The chief executive has claimed that without which the company cannot lure in new customers.

The plans which were reported in the Financial Times suggest that the staff will be conducting long interviews, monitoring and photographing subjects in their homes, travelling with them on their visits to casinos and bingo clubs and taking notes of their habits throughout their visits.

The new plans follow a difficult time in the bingo industry and a year which has seen Mecca stop the decline in its bingo revenues by increasing spend per visit through a program of change.

According to the group chief executive, Ian Burke attracting more people into the sites is the next task and this cannot be accomplished without a better understanding of why people go to bingo halls. Burke himself has spent a day following a couple from their home to one of the company’s casinos and observing them there. “At Mecca, there are already back-to-floor initiatives [in which head office staff work at the clubs],” said Jon McPherson, Rank’s group head of insight and analytics. “But immersion with a customer is very different from seeing things through the eyes of the employee.”

Mr McPherson hopes that Rank Interactive, the group’s online division can be included in further in-depth studies. “We have good technology for measuring how people move around a (online web) page, but we don’t know if people come home, put the children in bed, make a cup of tea and then sit down at the computer.”

This could be more difficult to achieve as well. Research into the Mecca bingo club habits may involve a few hours in a customer’s home before visiting the bingo club, however in relation to the Rank Interactive this would mean “staying in the customer’s spare bedroom”.

Rather than paying for a research company to follow the customers and provide the results, the Rank group is keen for its senior employees to take part so that they have a better understanding. The company executives are to take part in the initiatives therefore so that they can combine their experience in the industry, experience of looking at things from an employee point of view by going back to the clubs and to now look at things from a customer point of view all of which will hopefully lead to better executive decisions within the company. In order to achieve this they need to see their customers in a variety of setting not just while they are bingo or a casino but also before and after. They need to understand how the product fits into their customers lives.

“It’s been Ian’s passion,” said Mark Jones, managing director of Mecca. “It’s not just research, it’s ‘insight’, which is more intrusive, but in a positive way.”

Mecca has spent £1 million over the last two years on “customer insight” and the parent company Rank as a whole spent around £3 million which is around 2 percent of operating profits on qualitative and quantitative research.

Qualitative research which includes such strategies such as following customers in their day to day activities is obviously much more expensive than the quantitative survey research but provides a better insight into customer’s habits. It is growing in popularity with many big companies that have the research budgets to allow for such exercises.

According to Ben Page, Chief Executive of global research group Ipsos “Qualitative research has grown as fast if not faster as a proportion of the total” . He claims that 15 to 20 per cent of his company’s work is qualitative research.