Originally Posted by
777 global mile hound
But here is the great thing the price sensitive clients frequently bring me my way better less price sensitive customers through their satisfaction/referrals ^
That's an interesting point. Among my colleagues, I'm one of the few who seeks out SPG properties first. But I have converted a number of them to SPG over the years, and several are high revenue travelers. SPG gains some of its high revenue customers as a direct result of loyalty from relatively low revenue elite customers. This is not something that The Lacek Group can easily observe and measure.
There are marketing budgets at every program.However the rigidness that cost SPG their title of "Program of the Year" in 2005 back in the gold old "Freddies" days was IMO the result of the Lacek Group trying to extract every last cent through targeted marketing. Year after year leading up to that point.Targeted marketing was so under the radar at the time it took the membership base awhile to absorb what was going on. SPG at the time simply took it too far.............and the membership rebelled.
That and some major shifts in hotel award categories. The Lacek Group and SPG have definitely learned from some of their mistakes in targeted marketing, but it continues to have some problems. I don't, for example, understand how their recent end of year gift promo (free magazine subscription or $25 F&B credit) failed to have a complete list of all elite members. Either they foolishly left a number of them off the list intentionally, or they foolishly made some careless mistakes in compiling the list.
Despite the first article's pride in reducing simultaneous use of multiple offers, SPG often actually supports and wants the simultaneous use of certain offers! Some customers continue to be scared away by the uncertainty of this, though. We see it all the time here on FT. The T&Cs of most promos say something like, "cannot be combined with other offers," but this language is often not exactly as all the marketers intend. SPG corporate promos are almost always combinable with regional or hotel-specific promos, and this is an intentional arrangement -- not a situation of undesirable "gaming." All parties involved in creating these promos (SPG, the marketing companies, the regional internal marketing groups, and the hotels, etc.) share responsibility for addressing this problem. Failure of SPG and its marketers to clarify this means that they continue to interfere with the marketing plans by the individual hotels and their marketers.
The second article talks about profiling and segmentation of customers. I think that one of the flaws/risks in The Lacek Group's approach is that it depends heavily on past stay patterns to be a reliable predictor of future patterns. I'd love to hear how they calculate each promo's success and the ROI.