CONCLUSIONS PAPER

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

Featuring:

Larry Seligman, PhD, Director of BI and Analytics, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

Rohit Verma, PhD, Executive Director of the Center for Hospitality Research, Cornell University

Bruce Swann, Customer Intelligence Solutions Manager, SAS

Insights from a webcast sponsored by SAS and the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration

SAS Conclusions Paper

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Need For Greater Immediacy And Intimacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

What Can Social, Local and Mobile Do for You? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Challenges to the Integrated Data Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Resources Have Not Been There. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Data From Disparate Channels is Rarely Connected. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Companies Have Not Fully Exploited the Potential of Analytics. . . . . . . 5

Customers Are Unique and Expect to be Treated Their Way. . . . . . . . . 5

People Aren’t as Willing to Share as it Might at First Appear. . . . . . . . . 5

Eleven Tips for Customer-Focused Marketing in a

SoLoMo World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Integrate Data About Customers Into a Customer-Centric Database. . 6

Draw on as Many Data Sources as Possible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Analyze Unstructured Data in a Structured Way. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Use What You Know from Traditional Channels to

Predict Behavior in Emerging Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Capture Customer Preferences, Integrate Them Into Crm Systems –

And Abide By Them. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Acknowledge That Data Integration Won’t Be Perfect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Embed Analytics Into Marketing Efforts Across All Channels. . . . . . . . . 9

Put Intelligence in the Hands of Those Who Need it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Protect Customer Privacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Don’t Take Focus Away From Traditional Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Have a Vision, Develop a Road Map, and Make it Achievable. . . . . . . 11

Closing Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

About the Presenters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

For More Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

1

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

IntroductionAn application on a smartphone uses GPS capabilities to allow you to “check in” when arriving at a hospitality location . Once checked in, the establishment can then offer customized treatment, such as a coupon for a free drink in the lounge, a discounted spa service or a priority tee time .

Another smartphone app determines your location, suggests businesses close by, and even provides ratings or reviews . After your visit, you can post your own ratings, reviews and photos on the system or to a social media site such as Facebook or Yelp .

Another mobile app offers you coupons for discounts and special offers from businesses based on your location . Deals are activated only when a minimum number of people sign up, so you are encouraged to get friends and colleagues to join in .

This blending of social media and location-based services, delivered via mobile devices, is a hot topic for marketers . Whether you love or hate the buzzword for this convergence, SoLoMo represents a growing force . Consider that Foursquare alone has 20 million members, dozens of brands and hundreds of thousands of merchants . Other players are not exactly obscure startups – names like Google, Facebook and Groupon, for starters .

SoLoMo represents a new way of thinking for marketers . Instead of pushing messages to a user – say, through a broadcast commercial, direct mail or online ad – the message is pulled as a result of the user’s location and activity on social networks .

Should hospitality and gaming organizations take notice? Yes, if that’s where the customers are and how they want to be contacted . The chances of that are good . Consider that nearly 10 million smart phones were sold in the last three years, according to IDC1 . In-Stat predicts that 65 percent of all Americans will have a smartphone and/or tablet in just four years2; 66 percent of mobile phone subscribers aged 25-34 already have one3 . Some 1 .2 billion mobile Web users worldwide are responsible for 10 .9 billion app downloads .

Some of those billion-plus mobile users just might be your present and future guests .

1 DotMobi. mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats, accessed May 25, 2012.2 CNET News, reported by Don Reisinger, August 23, 20113 Nielsen Wire. America’s New Mobile Majority: a Look at Smartphone Owners in the US. May 5, 2012

(blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/who-owns-smartphones-in-the-us).

2

SAS Conclusions Paper

The Need For Greater Immediacy And Intimacy

In a marketing environment driven by mobility, the Internet and free choice, your customers are more personal and immediate than ever, yet more elusive and fickle than ever . They can so easily click to make a reservation – or to jump to the competition . Loyalty is a quaint memory in an on-demand world where every brand has a loyalty program with precious metal tiers .

As a result, customer-centricity has never been more vital, and it requires hospitality and gaming companies to be better at three things:

• Delivering offers that are relevant: the right message to the right customer at the right time and through the right channel .

• Capitalizing on new data sources, particularly social media, as both a source of inbound intelligence and outbound communication .

• Having the data-driven insight to be able to take the very best action for each customer at that moment .

In a webinar sponsored by the Cornell University Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) and SAS, presenters shared three distinct perspectives on why and how to achieve this customer-focused state:

• Larry Seligman of InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) shared experience from the field on what it takes to develop a 360-degree view of customers – and why it’s worth it .

• CHR Executive Director Rohit Verma provided big-picture perspective on trends, recent research and best practices for gaining that customer focus .

• Bruce Swann of SAS described the data management, analytics and reporting technologies that make this customer-centric ideal a reality .

3

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

What Can Social, Local and Mobile Do for You?Separately or together, social, location-based and mobile technologies open up enormous opportunities . For example, hospitality and gaming companies can:

• Deliver offers, invitations and services to smartphones, such as enabling guests to make dinner reservations, get discounts or schedule wake-up calls through an easy-to-use app .

“Just about all of us carry some sort of smart mobile device these days, and it’s very easy to use the GPS-based technology,” said Verma . “So companies are trying to offer some sort of coupons or special offers based on where the customers are passing by or checking in . These technologies are already being rolled out to many different market segments .”

• Gather data from social and mobile media to understand customer sentiment about the brand, a critical factor as guests pay more heed to online reviews . “Customers are increasingly using both the experts’ opinions and then balancing it with opinions from their peer group in the marketplace,” said Verma .

• Communicate with people the way they want to be reached. “Guests don’t want to have to open up a laptop and sit down in front of a stationary browser,” said Seligman . “They want very quick, convenient communication, and the mobile platform allows us to do that .”

• Integrate data from traditional and emerging channels to create new insight . “A valuable component of these rich new data sources is the potential to append a social media profile to a guest’s offline profile and get a more complete view of that guest in the offline and online world as well,” said Swann .

• Use social network analysis to understand customers’ circles of influence. “You can analyze customers and determine their influence – how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers they have, for example – and use these influence scores to bolster viral marketing efforts,” said Swann . “When you bring mobile into the fold as well, it just further completes that 360-degree view across all the different channels .”

4

SAS Conclusions Paper

Challenges to the Integrated Data IdealIn spite of the benefits to be gained, the hospitality and gaming industry has not taken full advantage of the SoLoMo phenomenon . For one, it is no small feat to understand new channels, integrate the data from many different sources and make sense of it in full context . There have definitely been some challenges to address .

The Resources Have Not Been There.

There has been little investment in this direction, either in people or dollars, according to CHR research. In a 2011 online survey of 426 marketing executives, about 35 percent of respondents said their organizations spend $10,000 or less on mobile media, and about two-thirds said their companies spend $10,000 or less on social media4 . The results were the same for both accommodation and destination companies, said Verma, co-author of the study .

Only about half of companies represented in the survey maintained some sort of blog . For those that did, the blogs were generally written by staff in marketing, social media or PR (or external partners) – rarely by top-level executives. This suggests that companies either don’t take blogs seriously as a marketing tool or don’t believe customers are seeking a personal connection with top management .

The survey also revealed that hospitality and gaming companies allocated only about 3 .25 staff members for data analytics and research – far fewer than you would expect, given the growing importance of data-driven decisions . So it is no surprise that 46 percent of respondents cited resource limitations as a big frustration, and 60 percent complained of budget limitations . “Ten years ago, technology issues would have been at the forefront,” said Verma . “The technology issues have been resolved, to an extent . Now it’s just a matter of getting the resources available .”

Data From Disparate Channels is Rarely Connected.

“We have a lot of data now, but the problem is what to do with the data,” said Verma . “The data may not be accurate or cleansed . We might not be able to correlate it with other data. There are problems with how to manage it well.” Even the largest hospitality companies are struggling with how to store, structure and process growing data volumes .

There is also the challenge of connecting the dots between old and new sources of data, said Seligman . “We have a great mobile platform that has been very successful and has been very well adopted by the guest community and is still growing very well . Sometimes we can link that data back to our customer relationship management data, and sometimes we can’t . Then with the social and local, we really can’t link that data back . That means that sometimes we know about our guests and how to treat them, and sometimes we don’t .”

4 Rohit Verma and Ken McGill. 2011 Travel Industry Benchmarking: Marketing ROI, Opportunities, and Challenges in Online and Social Media Channels for Destination and Marketing Firms. 2011 (hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-15562.html).

5

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

That challenge is particularly acute if you want to connect the dots to get a complete picture of the customer across brands as well. IHG offers more than 4,500 hotels in 100 countries under various brands, including InterContinental Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge and Candlewood Suites, as well as the newly announced Eden brand.

Companies Have Not Fully Exploited the Potential of Analytics.

“Most companies are doing more than just getting their feet wet with analytics, but they have a ways to go,” said Swann . “To an extent, they’re using analytics to better plan, execute and measure the results of their campaigns, but many of those campaign efforts tend to be focused on email or direct mail and do not incorporate different channels such as mobile or even social media, or inbound channels such as the Web or call center .

“Many companies are starting to look toward marketing optimization, where they can look across all the marketing initiatives they may have planned in a week or a quarter and use optimization techniques to really determine what is the right offer to the right guest at the right time and through the right channel . That seems to be the direction in which many companies are heading .”

Customers Are Unique and Expect to be Treated Their Way.

Empowered by online media, today’s consumers expect to star in their own personal realities . To them, there’s no mass market; they are a market of one, and they want to be treated that way . But since guest preferences are so diverse, especially for global organizations, can you know the best way to treat them?

“Because we have so many different distribution channels and geographies, the role of market segmentation has become a lot more important, and more complex,” said Verma . “It’s not appropriate to just say, ‘OK, these are the preferences of an older male guest versus a younger female guest .’ We have to just go down deeper, and the data allows us to do that .”

People Aren’t as Willing to Share as it Might at First Appear.

With location-based mobile devices and social media, it seems that customers are more comfortable divulging information about themselves . They are willing to refer friends and family in exchange for getting great rates on future stays . They are willing to share reviews of their experiences . And they are willing to like or follow an organization and post comments, for better or worse .

This would all be very good news for hospitality organizations that want to know as much as possible about customers, but this sharing is not as open or available as it might seem . People tend to open up initially, then pull back, said Verma . “As new technologies evolve, in the beginning people are more willing to share more information . But as time goes by, they realize that maybe they are sharing too much, so they stop sharing . Customer behavior changes for a while, but then it goes back to some comfort zone .”

6

SAS Conclusions Paper

Verma pointed to the industry’s historical experience with customer opinion surveys . “Years ago, we would probably send out a mail survey; people would fill it out and return it . Then we started calling people . In the beginning we had a lot of success; people would take the phone calls and answer the questions . Then as we all know, caller ID enables us to screen calls, so it became more difficult to get participation . In the next stage, we started doing email campaigns . Again, in the beginning, email surveys were very accurate and predictive, and then slowly people started getting more emails, more spam, and they were less likely to open our emails . Now we are at the point where people are downloading different apps to their mobile devices and sharing information, but slowly we are seeing people opting out of some of these things .”

The trend is consistent from one technology or contact channel to the next, Verma noted . “In the beginning they share, then they tend not to share . The basic value system of privacy and what people want to share probably hasn’t changed as much as we would like it to change; it’s just that a lot more data is available .”

Eleven Tips for Customer-Focused Marketing in a SoLoMo World

Integrate Data About Customers Into a Customer-Centric Database.

The data elements that represent a single customer will stream in from multiple sources . “So first of all, each company needs to develop a way to pull all data related to one customer into one system,” said Verma . “As an academic, it is easy for me to say, ‘You should look at all the markets and all the data .’ Outside of academia, that’s easy to say but not so easy to implement . We have multiple sources of information and we really can’t ignore it, but at the same time, we don’t need to provide equal weight to all different types of data . You need to discuss the amount of data available and what needs to be stored .”

Not all data will be useful, Verma noted . “So do some analysis along the way . If some aspect of the data is really not telling you anything, it’s time to get rid of that and only focus on the important things . Otherwise you’re just adding more noise to the signal .”

Draw on as Many Data Sources as Possible.

Facebook, Twitter and the HotelAdvisor review sites get a lot of attention, but there is a much larger universe of data waiting to be tapped from new channels . For example:

• Some sites ask visitors to share demographic information that can be useful in segmentation strategies, such as their home region, number of travelers in their party or the purpose of their travel .

• Unstructured text data can be gleaned from blogs, microblogs, tweets, Facebook comments and reviews on sites such as HotelChatter and TripAdvisor.

• Quantitative data can be collected from ratings sites . A consumer might rate a product or service as an x out of five, and you can zero into the factor behind the rating: service, location, décor, etc .

“ The basic value system of

privacy and what people

want to share probably hasn’t

changed as much as we would

like it to change; it’s just that a

lot more data is available.”

Rohit Verma Executive Director for the Center for Hospitality Research, Cornell University

7

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

• Then there is the issue of connections . You can see how friends, fans and followers are connected in social networks – a potentially powerful source of information about spheres of influence .

• A commensurate issue is that of impact . An organization may have 100,000 Twitter followers, but are they listening, retweeting, referring and linking – and if so, what is the impact?

“You can use data integration and data quality capabilities to consume data coming in from the social media world and match it with what you know about a customer from the offline world,” said Swann . “You can also blend that with Web analytics data as well as mobile data . The common denominator there is to have the data quality and data matching to build out an accurate profile .”

Analyze Unstructured Data in a Structured Way.

“By some estimates, more than 70 percent of all the data out there is unstructured and user-generated,” said Swann . “It is very powerful for the marketer to not only be able to tap into sources of unstructured data, such as social media content and comments in guest surveys, but to extrapolate meaningful new information from that data . You need to get that information to where it can drive action, deployed in the channels in which the customers are engaged .”

Analysis tools for this purpose fall into three broad categories:

• Descriptive statistics. How many Twitter followers do I have? How many reviews were generated on Facebook? Is this changing month over month? Are we seeing a positive trend? Are my customers’ conversations shifting more toward one channel or another?

• Social network analysis. You can dig into the network and find nodes of influence . Who are the most connected and influential people within social networks? This represents a real opportunity to target those influencers, to get them to be your advocates to spread word-of-mouth referrals .

• Text analytics. Evaluate the content in online conversations . Because these conversations are public, you can analyze reviews of your competitors and compare them against yours – a phenomenal opportunity that the industry has not had before .

Use What You Know from Traditional Channels to Predict Behavior in Emerging Channels.

Treat and control, test and learn . Look at what has happened in the past, and extrapolate from that to try to predict what is going to happen in the future . Predictive analysis might use time-series forecasting, where you look at past trends and try to fit the data to better predict the future . Or you could determine the probability that, given multiple options, individuals will pick one versus the other .

Past transactions or responses – real, known data about real, known customers – can be powerful predictors of future outcomes . Alternately, you can do systematic experimentation to gauge the effect of different messages, offers, channels or whatever other variable(s) you want to examine.

Data Sources Found in Social Media: • Unstructured text data.

• Images/audio/video.

• Ratings on travel review sites.

• Demographics.

• Social network connections.

• Impact as an influencer.

8

SAS Conclusions Paper

“For example, let’s say InterContinental Hotel Group has my actual profile of how often I have stayed at their hotel,” said Verma . “Let’s say they use SAS® to run the models . Now they can do some experimentation with me . They can give me some special promotion or offer, track how I respond, and then connect the two sides: my actual usage and how I react to some new ideas . This kind of experimentation helps in getting more predictive power .” Over time, the results of systematic experiments reveals guest preferences, information that can be applied to emerging channels where you might have less data .

Capture Customer Preferences, Integrate Them Into Crm Systems – And Abide By Them.

Whether you surmise guest preferences from past responses to experimentation – or simply ask guests what they prefer – this is important information to heed, said Swann . “A preference center that spans channels should be a critical component within the customer relationship management (CRM) database, so the marketer has access to the latest and greatest preferences that customers have stated . When you couple that knowledge with marketing optimization that helps you determine the right offer, message or content to deliver, you improve relevance, which in turn reduces opt-out rates .

“The intent of a preference center is to get the customer to share some useful information, such as an email address, Twitter handle or preferences for what types of marketing communications they want to receive . A good practice would be to somehow incent them to do that and feel good about doing that . But then the key is to not let that preference data sit in a silo somewhere .”

Acknowledge That Data Integration Won’t Be Perfect.

“We have always wanted to have a 360-degree view of the customer,” said Seligman . “Back when the dominant channels were direct marketing and email, we could do that to a large extent, because we knew who was receiving our direct mail and email campaigns . When you bring in mobile channels, sometimes we know the person using the mobile app, and sometimes we don’t . In social channels, we don’t know who the person is, for the most part .

“As much as we would like to have a complete understanding of everyone across email, direct mail, social media and location-based services, it’s more a matter of creating a second set of data for the new channels . We know a lot about them, but we don’t necessarily know who they are, and we can’t link them back to a known customer profile . So we end up with a second database, which will have a lot of overlap with the first, but we can identify segments in this new, second database and discover how to communicate effectively with those segments in a way they desire .”

9

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

Embed Analytics Into Marketing Efforts Across All Channels.

Hospitality and gaming companies need to be able to integrate analytics into marketing campaigns across email, mobile, direct mail and other contact channels . Through predictive models and data mining, you can:

• Identify the historical factors that maximized return on customer engagements in the past .

• Use that knowledge to understand why customers responded to certain messages and promotions .

• Predict future patterns.

You can identify customer groups for unique treatments based on profitability, influence, loyalty, lifetime value and other values derived from multiple inputs . You can identify future probabilities that account for many factors, not just what happened in the past .

“Marketers need to integrate analytics into the day-to-day business in two ways: to optimize cross-channel campaigns and to improve the real-time conversation,” said Swann . “Whether the customer is engaged on the website or calling into the reservation center, analytics should be helping make a decision as to the best message, offer or channel to use, based on that point in time, given the customer’s status or where they are in the customer life cycle .”

Put Intelligence in the Hands of Those Who Need it.

When reservation agents have a customer on the phone or front desk personnel have a guest at the counter, analytics behind the scenes should be giving them the information they need to optimize the interaction – right now . You need to be able to deliver intelligence into the hands of all customer-facing staff in a form they can use .

This ideal has historically been tough to implement, because the niche applications used for different business functions have not been on great speaking terms . Unlike niche tools, a business analytics framework makes it easy to deliver the results from analytical processes into operational systems .

Protect Customer Privacy.

When you start talking about connecting online and offline personas, there’s a fine line between being customer-focused and being invasive, Seligman warned . “Think about how you would feel as a customer . Do you want what you’ve said on Facebook to be linkable back to some transaction record you have at a particular company? Is that something you really want? We’re not going to do anything like that if we think it’s treading on data privacy issues or it’s just flat against the preferences of our guests .”

“Marketers need to integrate

analytics into the day-to-

day business in two ways:

to optimize cross-channel

campaigns and to improve the

real-time conversation. Whether

the customer is engaged on

the website or calling into the

reservation center, analytics

should be helping make a

decision as to the best message,

offer or channel to use, based

on that point in time, given the

customer’s status or where they

are in the customer life cycle.”

Bruce Swann Customer Intelligence Solutions Manager, SAS

In a business analytics

framework, data management

processes take the information

from multiple sources, prepare

it and make it available for

analytic processes. Insights

from analytics can be reported

to business systems, on the

Web and to mobile devices

to get information to decision

makers when they need it.

10

SAS Conclusions Paper

Swann agreed . Just because something is technologically possible doesn’t mean it is desirable . “Data privacy should be at the heart and soul of how that data is leveraged, but there are definitely some tactics that could be deployed between these different channels, because more often than not, somebody who is active in social media also makes extensive use of their mobile device . There are ways of blending those things together, such as running some type of text promotion that is advertised on your fan page – or vice versa, advertising your fan page through a mobile campaign . The key is being able to link those two together .”

“My advice would be to ask customers if it is OK to collect this information in order to serve them better,” said Swann . “The use of a very well-designed preference center can facilitate very high opt-ins and the customer’s willingness to give up information that could potentially be used for marketing offers and different services that could be delivered through email, mobile devices or through an app .”

Don’t Take Focus Away From Traditional Channels.

In all the excitement about social and mobile channels, are direct marketing and email becoming passé? No, said Verma . Not all channels are appropriate for all purposes . For instance, email is good for longer communications, such as a newsletter . Facebook is good for sharing more concise content, as well as photographs and video . Twitter is best for a sense of conversational immediacy .

Besides, email and direct mail are delivering value in other ways, said Seligman . “You cannot just abandon those traditional channels where you have better integration with your CRM data, where you have a history of knowing what works and what doesn’t work . We should be focusing more on social and mobile, but in degrees, unless that is core to your company strategy .

“You know the balance is going to evolve over time . You know you’re going to have degradation of marketing performance in those [traditional] channels . You know that you have got to learn how to manage these new channels, but you need a long transition plan to go to that . Just as email never fully replaced direct mail, I don’t see social and mobile ever completely replacing email . It will come to some level and then it will stop .”

Now that marketers are not so dependent on the traditional outbound channels, they can be free to use them more for testing, said Swann . “When those channels were the mainstay of their marketing, they didn’t want to set aside a control group or mess with anything at all . But now with the proliferation of other channels, there are opportunities to do more testing in direct mail or email to find out what works and then applying that learning to new channels .”

“The greatest value of integrating

marketing is the ability to use

analytics to drive not only the

marketing but improvements in

the customer experience.”

Bruce Swann Customer Intelligence Solutions Manager, SAS

Even when customers willingly

divulge the information, you

can only do so much with it.

The technologies are available

to collect social media data

and link it back to the customer

profile, but even if guests’

Facebook posts are publicly

available, there is a point where

this linking could seem invasive,

even creepy.

11

Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

Have a Vision, Develop a Road Map, and Make it Achievable.

If your organization is just getting started, start small with an easily answerable problem, try to do that really well, and branch out from there,” said Seligman . “If you start out by focusing on something really complex and cutting-edge, this can be a high-risk, high-reward proposition . If you know something more than the rest of us know, great; but if you don’t, start out with something easier to do and work your way up from there .”

Swann recommends collaboratively developing a road map of what needs to be done and when, based on a shared vision of the end product . “The first step in that road map is to bring together all these different, rich sources of siloed data – whether it be social, local, mobile or all of these sources – into a 360-degree view of the customer . And then from there, layer on campaign management or marketing optimization, then set your sights on deploying that through real-time channels to further enhance the customer experience .”

Closing Thoughts“As a customer, I use my mobile device or go to social media channels for basically three reasons,” said Verma . “Control, convenience and flexibility . I have control of the choice when I want to use the service or not . I gain convenience with applications that allow me to get information, offers and services from a hotel ahead of time . There is more flexibility because I have more choice in channels . When we think about the trends, we will see growth in the tools and techniques that give the customer more control, convenience and flexibility .”

Yet hospitality and gaming companies have only begun taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by these new channels .

“The first real opportunity is in breaking down some of the data silos from all these different channels,” said Swann . “Being able to correlate data among sources, such as tying social media data with somebody’s offline profile . Being able to take advantage of this massive amount of potential data that is out there and make quick decisions on it, using high-performance analytics and data visualizations to really be able to interpret the data, understand what it means, and better yet, to be able to make decisions on it .”

“We have to use these technologies to redefine what a customer relationship means,” said Seligman . “Imagine that you have a friend you see at work . You pass by him in the halls, you say ‘hi’ and every now and then you chat for a minute, and that’s about it . And then suddenly one day that person opens up to you and tells you more about his personal life . So now this person has reached out, and the ball is in your court . What are you going to do with that? Are you going to exploit it or are you going to say, ‘Here’s a chance to have a deeper relationship?’

“That’s exactly what’s going on here . We have had a transactional and direct mail, email type of understanding of our customers, and that was fine . Now all of a sudden, they’re opening up; they’re telling us more about themselves than they ever did . So now the ball is in the court of companies to ask, ‘How are we going to develop this into a richer, deeper relationship?’”

“You cannot just abandon those

traditional channels where you

have better integration with

your CRM data, where you

have a history of knowing what

works and what doesn’t work.

We should be focusing more

on social and mobile, but in

degrees, unless that is core to

your company strategy.

Larry SeligmanDirector of BI and Analytics, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

“We have had a transactional

and direct mail, email type of

understanding of our customers,

and that was fine. Now all of

a sudden, they’re opening up;

they’re telling us more about

themselves than they ever did.

So now the ball is in the court

of companies to ask, ‘How are

we going to develop this into a

richer, deeper relationship?’”

Larry SeligmanDirector of BI and Analytics, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

12

SAS Conclusions Paper

About the Presenters

Larry Seligman, PhD,Director of BI and Analytics, InterContinental Hotels Group

Larry Seligman is responsible for advanced analytics related to campaign optimization, customer scoring, performance analysis and the IT analytics agenda. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Georgia Tech. He has published and presented in several academic journals and conferences. Before joining IHG, he served on the faculties of the University of Georgia and the University of Cincinnati .

Rohit Verma, PhD, Professor and Executive Director for the Center for Hospitality Research, Cornell University

Rohit Verma’s research interests include new product/service design, quality management and process improvement, and operations/marketing interrelated issues. He has published more than 50 articles in prestigious business journals and has received several teaching and research awards . Before joining the Cornell faculty, he was the George Eccles Professor of Management in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah .

Bruce SwannCustomer Intelligence Solutions Manager, SAS

Bruce Swann has more than 14 years of experience working with marketing automation, predictive analytics, marketing resource management, Web analytics, social media, mobile marketing and email marketing .

At SAS, he works closely with prospects and customers in hospitality, sports and gaming to help design the optimal SAS Customer Intelligence platform based on current and future business requirements . Before joining SAS, Swann was the Director of Interactive Solutions at Merkle and before that was Director of Solutions Consulting at Unica. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of North Florida, majoring in marketing and management .

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Customer-Focused Marketing for Hospitality and Gaming

For More Information To view the on-demand webinar: sas.com/reg/web/corp/1888633 .

Find research, publications reports, news archives and more from the Cornell University Center for Hospitality Research at hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr .

For more about analytics for the hospitality and gaming industry, visit SAS on the Web at

sas.com/industry/hospitality .

To read the SAS blog for the hospitality and gaming industry:

blogs.sas.com/content/hospitality.

Follow the Cornell/SAS webinar series on Twitter: #CHRSAS

This webcast was part of the Insights and Innovations for Hospitality and Gaming Webcast Series, sponsored by the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration and SAS. Each webcast highlights a hot topic in the hospitality and gaming industry, including data quality, labor planning, customer loyalty programs, sustainability and more .

About SASSAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market . Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 55,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW® . For more information on SAS® Business Analytics software and services, visit sas.com .

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