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.
-
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 Ajay Kelkar on Sun, May 31, 2009
For Marketer’s any change in customer behaviour is a “gold mine”. Marketing
to customer’s whose behaviour is changing is far more rewarding than marketing
to “static” customers! But sometimes there is "too much change" and in today's market that is exactly what is happening. Marketer's need ,what we at Cequity, call a Modelling factory approach-How to build models at speed!
Gallup
chief economist Dennis Jacobe concurs that "a fundamental change is taking
place" in the behavior of U.S. consumers, even if it's not clear how
permanent it will be.There is, of course, the irony that as consumers do the
right thing for themselves by saving more, they hurt the economy's chances of
revival by spending less, the "paradox of thrift" as put forth by
John Maynard Keynes.
Consumer
behaviour and Analytics practises are definitely out of date in today's era of large changes in customer behaviour. Radical changes in
patterns of consumption are here to stay. Even a reduction of the Bank
rate to 0% is not going to impact consumption. The economy needs a much
bigger shift to ignite the circular flow of income from customers to suppliers
of services and goods.For example, a scoring model might lose its predictive
power during a recession if the characteristics entered into the model or the
underlying customer population are sensitive to the economic cycle. As a consequence,
tomorrow's business decisions are driven by models that meticulously
encapsulate yesterday's reality.
BIG research's
Consumer Intentions & Actions Survey monitors shopper behaviour and has
this interesting insight!Shoppers are increasingly rethinking some of their
purchases before they head to check-out counters…close to three in five
(58.1%) say they’re focused on needs over wants, up from last month (57.6%) as
well as last year (51.0%).
While
it’s obvious that consumers have put the pinch on spending during this
recession, can we expect long-term changes to shoppers’ spending habits?
90.7% of consumers say yes…overall, it appears consumers will simply be more
thoughtful when spending over the next five years, with the majority saying
they will consider each purchase more carefully (55.2%) and/or become more
price conscious (50.7%) when buying food or clothing. Additional plans
include sticking to a budget (48.1%), dining out less (46.3%), and vowing not
to incur a large credit card debt (43.4%)
In the past maybe companies could get by without building analytical capability. But in today's hyper changing market scenario companies need to invest in bringing about a data based marketing culture-without which their ability to respond to quick changes in customer behaviour will be limited!
Read more about how the impact of a recession could have a long term effect on spending patterns of the Boomers segment!
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/client/e3ice058ab1756ad165d5af782db9c6a648?pn=1