Man behind Caesars Entertainment talks Horseshoe Casino Cleveland

CLEVELAND - The Horseshoe Casino Cleveland is a partnership between Dan Gilbert’s Rock Gaming and Caesars Entertainment, the world's largest gaming company with such brands as Caesars, Harrah’s, Showboat, Bally’s, Horseshoe, Rio; a total of 54 casinos on four continents.

Gary Loveman is CEO of Caesars Entertainment. Oddly enough, he’s a man who came to this role not up through the ranks of casino gambling, but from academia. Loveman is a former Harvard Business School professor, a man with PhD in economics from MIT, who took his knowledge of marketing and service management and applied it to this business made famous by Bugsy Siegel-like gangsters.

By definition, to gamble is to bet on an uncertain outcome. Loveman has used his MIT experience, and knowledge of marketing and service management, to remove as much uncertainty as he can from casino operations. Not when it comes to the games, of course, but when it comes to his customers.

Loveman's expertise lies in knowing more about the people that visit his casinos than maybe they know about themselves: what games they like to play, how long they're likely to play them, what is most likely to entice them to come back, and using that knowledge to maximize their experience and the casino's profitability.

Caesars properties all share is a database of 40 million customers who hold a Caesars Total Rewards card, the industry's most successful rewards card program.

The card offers incentives as wide as the imagination tested and retested for their success in enticing customers to come, stay, play and leave happy.

If a customer leaves happy, they are more likely to return and it is the average, run-of-the-mill player that make up the vast majority of a casino's profits, not the so-called high rollers.

These are some of the things Loveman touched on when he came to Cleveland in March to speak before the Greater Cleveland Partnership about the opening of the Horseshoe Casino. In this web exclusive we have an extended look at some of his remarks.