A major hospitality company turned to Echelon for a better way to target consumers with money to spend – and those who are most likely to afford a premium hospitality experience.

A leading hospitality company had exhausted the potential of its commercial segmentation system and sought new approaches to break the constraints of their current targeting tools.

Although lifestage (i.e. age, presence/ages of kids) was the primary driver for purchasers of the company’s product, Echelon’s analysis identified that the company’s targeting strategy was missing a critical factor: an accurate and detailed measure of spending power, i.e., who among their core target audience could actually afford a stay at a premium hotel?

Echelon overlaid the company’s existing lifestage segmentation system with its Discretionary Spending Index® (DSI™), a continuous household-based score of 1 to 1,000 that when appended to customer and prospect files provides a household level measure of spending capacity.

With the overlay completed, the company was able to identify households within the core selected lifestage clusters that did not meet the desired profile for premium property guests. In fact, over 23% of the company’s original target audience did not have the necessary spending power for premium properties and thus could be excluded from future campaigns.

What’s more, the company was able to identify several meaningful pockets of households that were not in the core lifestage clusters. These households had significant spending power and thus could be included in future prospecting and messaging trials. Performing this exercise for other property types (mid-scale and economy properties) yielded similar results.

The bottom line: Echelon demonstrated it could enhance the performance of the company’s existing lifestage segmentation system, resulting in significant improvements in its targeting efficiency.