HMG 6446 Learning Activity 7

Learning Activity 7

What were XYZ’s three questions that addressed growth?

1. How can XYZ maximize its marketing dollars to acquire and retain customers?

2. How can it leverage its information-rich customer database containing tens of millions of unique customers across multiple brands while respecting individual hotel brand identities?

3. What customer-facing initiative can it create to respond to competitors and to Wall Street analysts’ questions?

In addition to a database, what are some other parts of a loyalty system?

In addition to the main member database, data marts are used to support the various marketing campaigns to acquire new members and activate existing members. These campaigns comprise seasonal promotions, email campaigns, and direct mail. Hotel companies access a variety of databases which identify market segments, campaign success, and filter opt-outs and do-not-contact attributes. Combining, for analysis purposes, the loyalty database with the enterprise customer data warehouse can also provide additional insight into segmentation, behavior, trends, and other analytics.

Profiles – a set of attributes and relationships that that classify an entity. Using this profile, the organization may then spend dollars more accurately in targeting potential like customers.

Data mining – analysis of data for potential relationships. Most data mining is statistical and can involve model formation such as profiling, clustering, and cluster mapping.

What is brand identity?

Brand identity is how a business want to be perceived by consumers. The components of the brand (name, logo, tone, tagline, typeface) are created by the business to reflect the value the company is trying to bring to the market and to appeal to its customers.

How did XYZ prevent duplicate records from being formed?

They added two of the existing program databases into a single database and then doing a match, using various rules that included credit card numbers, addresses, names, and phone numbers, developed a fresh database. In an iterative fashion, they added one current database at a time to the fresh database until all current program members were in the new loyalty database. It should be noted that part of the effort included the omission of longtime inactive members and members whose name or identity could not be recognized.