Futurity – Whether you think online betting is innocent entertainment or a shady activity may have to do with what you call it, according to a new study that shows how industry labels help shape consumer attitudes.
“Changing an industry label from gambling to gaming affects what consumers, especially nonusers, think of betting online,” write Kathy LaTour, associate professor of services marketing at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, and Ashlee Humphreys of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, in a study published online in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“A label like gaming prompts all sorts of implicit associations like entertainment and fun, while a label like gambling can prompt seedier implicit associations like crime.”
LaTour and Humphreys analyzed media descriptions of online, lottery, and casino gambling between 1980 and 2010 in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
They then analyzed coverage of “Black Friday,” April 15, 2011, when the federal government shut down the three largest online betting sites.
Newspapers shifted how they described the online activity, framing it more as a crime, which led to a shift in consumer judgments about the legitimacy of online casinos, especially among nonusers.
Following the switch, a clear pattern emerged—that lotteries and casinos were associated as legitimate forms of entertainment and business, while online gambling was associated more with crime and regulation.
