BUSINESS TRAVELER GROWTH STRATEGY GERMANY

This business case is related to a market share growth strategy of a global airline in the German market. Whereas the airline's market share in the Netherlands was above 55%, just over the border in Germany it was only 6%. A strategic study revealed that the airline's natural catchment area included North Rhine-Westphalia/NRW as well. Hence, the aim was to grow the market share of frequent business travelers to at least 15% in 5 years.

Situation -  North Rhine-Westphalia is one of the largest Governate of Germany with over 17Mn residents. However, we knew from quantitative consumer market research, that frequent travelers only made up 4% - or approximately 500.000 persons - of the total adult population.

Hence, to reach them effectively while avoiding wasting millions of marketing dollars on expensive mass media campaigns, we had to come up with a disruptive strategy (please bear in mind that those days internet and email campaigns did not exist).

Solution - Using mass media (TV, radio, print) would have delivered an unfavorable ROI, so we pivoted to precision direct marketing aimed exclusively at frequent travelers. The core challenge was accurate identification. We solved this with profile matching: building a statistically robust target profile through quantitative, representative research, then extrapolating it across a national database of 45 million households. This enabled addressable campaigns that focused spend on high-propensity travelers and minimized waste.

eMs Contribution - Strategic market assessment │ strategy design │ development of the direct marketing campaign strategy │ Design of the campaign calendar and implementation management of the direct marketing campaigns.