Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, May 30, 2010
Most often hospitality industry talk a lot about customer service at the property as a key differentiator to customer experience & satisfaction.
I believe this is not the case and most often, it starts with even before the customer visits the hotel or the restaurant of choice. Also, there are many a times, the post usage experience is forgotten and very rarely have I ever seen any credible data-led customer marketing intiatives in this phase.
It was interesting to see Intercontinental Hotels do very interesting customer marketing work in this area. Here are some interesting facts:
- Intercontinental Hotel Group’s (IHG’s) uses of data-driven marketing to improve communications with existing customers and prospects is an interesting case study for many hotel groups across the world.
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Lincoln Barrett, vice president for guest marketing and alliances, shared that, for IHG, building a customer-centric marketing strategy is based on 3 Key pillars:
- Invest in technology
- Expand into new frontiers
- Build a centralized customer organization
She was talking at the UNICA Marketing Innovation Summit in Orlando.
- She talked about the need for real-time data mart that would allow IHG to match the data it was gathering through proprietary and third-party sources to existing customer information.
- According to her this step also made it possible to gain immediate access to data for analysis or campaign building purposes – a significant upgrade to IHG's previous functionality, which updated records in batches and only made data available some 30 days after a customer incident (like a hotel stay).
- She talked about some interesting trends in hospitality Marketing - Right Time marketing, Channel Synergy, Glocal Communication, Non-member marketing etc.
Posted by S Swaminathan on Mon, May 17, 2010
With digital marketing taking centrestage, it time to reassess and evaluate age-old marketing techniques and adapt them to new digital world. Here's how Domino's Pizza is doing it.
Domino's Pizza is using the persuasive power of socially connected consumers who have huge influence over each other; the key idea here is how they harness that power and put it to work for thier brand—with rewards, of course, for the consumers in question.
Domino's Pizza has developed a widget that consumers can place on their social networking profile, blog or other online presence, which their friends can then click on in order to order a pizza. For every order, they get 0.5 percent of the sale.
Read more here
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Wed, Apr 15, 2009
A new research report by data managers, CDMS, into total campaign management outsourcing amongst top UK Companies shows that a total of 42% UK Companies outsource their Direct Marketing Campaign Management. With companies realising the benefits of outsourcing marketing to experts their ROI calculations are rising from the piles.
http://www.prlog.org/10000463-47-of-banks-outsource-their-direct-marketing-campaign-management.html
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Tue, Apr 07, 2009
Marketing is possibly amongst the last areas in the corporate world to really embrace automation. Possibly it has been driven too much by "right brained" creative persuits and it is only now that "left brain" orientation is making Marketing a far more number driven discipline. Technology allows marketers to start engaging with their customers in previously unthought of ways. It allows marketers to move from the world of "push marketing" to the unexplored territory of "pull marketing" through the use of customer data which allows marketing action to become far more relevant. However all this transfoms marketing into a process discipline where it is critical to become process focussed. How do marketers go about bringing automation into the Marketing function? Where should you start? Here is an interesting paper by Bruce Biegel of the Winterberry group which provides insights into the state of marketing automation and also provides guidance on what prospective buyers of Marketing automation technology should look for -check it out! Marketing Automation