Here’s what Cirque du Soleil knows about its typical ticket buyers in North America: They are between 35 to 55 years old. They live in households that earn more than $100,000 per year. Just over half (52 percent) are female. And most of them won’t drive more than 60 minutes to see a show.
That last data point is a critical one, said Axel Bedikyan, director of marketing intelligence and planning at Cirque du Soleil. The company sold 15 million tickets in 2012, but there is a big opportunity to grow: only 20 percent of North American consumers have seen a Cirque spectacle, in spite of broad market awareness. Bedikyan said his company
Bedikyan was one of several speakers at the Esri Business Summit, held in July in San Diego. There, executives discussed the challenges involved in implementing location analytics. The biggest issue cited by Bedikyan, as well as executives from retailers like Starbucks and Petco, was winning acceptance across their organizations for what analytics can do. This effort requires communicating with IT and business leaders about the need to think differently about the data they collect and analyze for decision-making, like where to hold a performance or where to build a new store.
For analytics champions inside an enterprise, “the magic does come when you find a BI or IT counterpart,” said Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer at Ventana Research, during one of the sessions. It’s not enough for one business group to be a service center for another, Smith said, suggesting that such an arrangement would inhibit adoption. A proof-of-concept project to justify the ROI of analytics is a good tactic to win support, he added.
Getting Others to Join the Analytics Circus
At Cirque du Soleil, Bedikyan said he has sought to build alliances with marketers in the different units of the global company. For example, he showed his colleagues data that correlated the three locations of recent performances in the Dallas metropolitan area, with the drive times to the particular venues. The analysis showed that a 2011 show at Dr. Pepper Arena, earned better results than a 2007 show at Fair Park and a 2012 performance at 500 Memorial Drive. The results matched demographic data that showed the Dr. Pepper location was a shorter drive for Cirque du Soleil’s typically affluent audience, he said.
This kind of finding “provides a new hypothesis that we can go and test” in other locations, Bedikyan said.
Bedikyan said the goal of such projects is to breed analytics champions within different business units, especially among marketing professionals, and he cited four factors to working with marketers:
1. Engage creatively with people who can become ambassadors in the business units.
2. Understand drivers and barriers for them to using analytics. There were people who might be interested in adopting analytics but hesitated. “As we went along, we came up with ways to help them use it,” Bedikyan said.
3. Start small. He suggested concentrating on one or two markets at first. Brainstorm with colleagues working there, and then spread ideas based on their experiences to other executives.
4. Get the analytics team staffed right to support the spread of analytics capabilities. “Quality is more important than quantity,” he said, adding that he had hired a person who has expertise in both marketing and geographic systems for his team based at headquarters in Montreal.
Bedikyan said his campaign would continue. “We are just starting our journey. Three years ago, we were blind. Today we are location aware,” he said. “We’re making this information enterprise-wide, if anyone from marketing or [other] executives wants to, they can pull up an update.”
{ SOURCE: Data-Informed.com | http://goo.gl/Y6wWvJ }
