A major cruise line turned to Echelon to find new prospects for its cruise experience.

With the ever expanding variety of leisure travel options, from adventure travel to all-inclusive resorts, travelers have more choices than ever.

No wonder a leading cruise line wanted to take a fresh look at its marketing strategy. Most importantly, it wanted to develop a plan to expand its marketing efforts to first-time cruisers outside its core target audience (age 55+).

Identifying Alternatives to ‘Age’ and ‘Income’ to Find New Cruisers

First, Echelon met with the cruise line to discuss the profile of their guests and the history of their marketing strategy. According to the cruise line’s marketing director, the profile of their core guests was age 55+ with household (HH) income between $75K- $125K. These cruisers tended to travel four times per year with one of those trips being devoted to a cruise. The cruise line largely depended on standard lifestage segmentation systems and household income to segment their target audience and decide which prospects to mail for various offers.
While age was certainly the driving force for targeting new cruisers, the cruise line had exhausted its efforts to find new first-time cruisers within its preferred lifestage segmentation clusters and needed to determine if there were potential new cruisers in other clusters.

Echelon Shows Spending Power Correlates with Cruiser Profiles

Echelon performed an analysis for the cruise line identify a correlation between travelers’ spending with the cruise line and Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index® (DSI™), a household level scoring system of 1 to 1000 that rates customers on their ability to spend. The unique value of DSI™ is its recognition that spending power is the intersection of income, expenses and financial resources – these are all combined to create a superior multi-dimensional view of individual HHs. The higher the DSI score, the more likely it is for that consumer to have significant disposable assets. The analysis revealed a strong correlation – as spending with the cruise line increased, so did the cruiser’s Echelon DSI score.

Echelon revealed that the cruise line’s younger cruisers generally have a disproportionately higher incidence of DSI scores >500 relative to the overall population. This suggested that higher spending power early in life translated into increased discretionary time available for travel. Therefore, prospecting efforts could be directed at younger consumers who had not sailed with the cruise line before, but who had high DSI scores. By combining DSI with known travel category transactional data, the cruise line could be even more efficient at identifying younger consumers with both the ability to spend on a cruise and the affinity for traveling.

The outcome? While the biggest source of new cruisers may be older households, there is an untapped market of younger households who can be targeted. By incorporating a measure of discretionary spending power into the cruise line’s targeting strategy, it could expand its traditional prospecting techniques and find a fresh source of new cruisers.