Brief
Neilson is the second largest active holiday specialist in the UK with a focus upon summer clubs and winter sports. The Neilson brand was suffering from brand erosion and a declining awareness within market. Our brief was to define the Neilson brand and commercial hierarchies, create a marketing strategy and realign the marketing budget to deliver optimum return on investment.
Insight
The Neilson marketing team are focused on delivering the best season to their new and loyal customers across both winter and summer holidays. Marketing activity was built around year-on-year campaigns or tactical reactions to the changing market or weather. Customer insight information was poor and Neilson was unable to articulate, who there target market was with any certainty. Marketing activity was geared to be generic, hoping to influence customers as broad families with 2 children under 5 too twenty something’s, looking for an extreme kite surfing experience. The result was exceptionally poor ROI across all marketing and brand erosion as Neilson was unable to articulate it’s proposition effectively when targeting, communicating to and selling holidays to new guests. Indentifying where there is a biggest return on investment could be leveraged was not being identified and short-term tactical activities were employed to bolster sales at the detriment of the brand and the customer communication hierarchy.
Objectives
- Identify and articulate the Neilson customer base both current and potential
- Acquire more new customers i.e. sales conversions not repeat business
- Retain existing customers and encourage seasonal cross selling
- Reverse falling sale figures without causing longer term damage
- Increase brand awareness amongst, emerging customer bases
- Align hierarchy of sub products brands and associated product offering
- Communicate to emerging customer bases using a unified tone of voice
- Create a hierarchy of communications across summer and winter products
- Align the marketing spend to target the most profitable customers
- Audit the market budget and make recommendations as needed
- Evaluate marketing activities against established benchmarks
- Mentor the marketing team where need and provide support as needed
- Gain consistency in communication – words, images and media
Execution
Over the course of a month Brightenup carefully audited the marketing mix at Neilson, investigating all areas of the marketing mix. It really was the project that kept giving, the more we scrutinized the more issues came to light. The project started off with a thorough ‘Brightenup Health Check’ to ascertain which activities were in progress or planned, reviewing all the results and interrogating the marketing spend against sales. This involved working with the marketing team to gain a real insight and collect fresh data. The outcome and observations were aastonishing and changes to the budget spend, targeting and activity type were made almost immediately.
The biggest finding was that the target customer and existing customer bases needed urgent clarifying and segmenting. This activity enables both the product and marketing team, to focus their activity on the customer segments, which will truly deliver the most appropriate return. To achieve this Brightenup adopted both qualative and quantative research methods, as well creating a comprehensive ‘pen portrait’ portfolio, for both the winter and summer targets and loyal guests.
From this we were able to ascertain who the most profitable and emerging customer segments were and how they should be targeted. Further more Brightenup was able to establish a tone of voice for the brand, which would motivate and target the specific customer segments. This not only helped to reposition the brand, but also enabled it to start to be consistent, across its targeted outbound communications.
The tone of voice, pen portraits and customer targeting, established a benchmark by which Brightenup were able to critique the quality of the creative output, from the agencies Neilson were contracting. The result demonstrated issues with brand dilution, erosion, misuse and a generally low standard of creative output. To counter these issues, Brightenup was able to guide and provide feedback for the marketing team to make appropriate changes and direction for its agencies. We then set about updating the brochure designs with more appropriate, less clichéd imagery, a complete rework of the pagination and of course rewriting all the copy in the new tone of voice. Utilising the successfully adapted brochure, direct mail, advertising, affiliate marketing and the booking website quickly followed. By working with all of Neilsons existing agencies, Brightenup were able to successfully establish the brand credibility and create consistency within weeks.
The power customer segmentation, has enabled the media spend to be deployed smartly when purchasing media and planning campaigns, creating a powerful brand and ultimately, turned around a brand in decline.
Results
The marketing team now had a robust 4 year marketing plan. Customer targeting and activities are now aligned and Neilson have some powerful creative, to ensure that marketing budgets reaches its full potential.
- Brochure designs that helped delver c 5% increase in early bird bookings
- Increased direct mail responses into converted bookings by 9%
- Budgets realigned to drive more direct on line booking – increase 19%
- Reached seasonal target sales for both summer and winter holiday consecutively
If you would like to find out more about this project or would like more information about our colouring in, spreadsheets or interweb things then please contact Jo Livesey on 01273 731633 or if you’re shy email jo@brightenup.me
