Business Traveler Market Share Growth Strategy NRW 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 Bunderlander 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 - Since the use mass media such as newspapers, TV, radio, etc. would have resulted in a very negative ROI, we decided to go for direct marketing. The only issue was of how to identify and target frequent travelers effectively. The solution was profile matching by means of quantitative representative research and data extrapolation of a 45Mn households database.

eMs Contribution - Strategic market assessment │ strategy design │ development of the direct mail campaign│management of the research and execution of the direct mail campaigns.