Scientific Journal of E-Business April 2013, Volume 2, Issue 2, PP.23-31
Analysis of Airlines Marketing Based on Double Clustering Feng Guohe1,2# Liang Xiaoting1 1. School of Economics & Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China 2. Information Technology Research Base of Civil Aviation Administration of China, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin, 300300, China #
Email:ghfeng@163.com.
Abstract The results from the analysis of air line’s marketing based on characteristics cluster both of customer behavior and flight routes was obtained in this paper to investigate the cluster change in different periods. , By means of the analyzed information in this paper, several management and marketing policy for different kinds of customers were put forward to maximize profits of airlines. Keywords: Airlines; Cluster Analysis; Marketing Plan
1 INTRODUCTION In the fierce market competition, for airlines, how to meet customer needs and how to identify valuable customers are the important parts of implementation of marketing strategy. Having fully grasped customer conditions and behavior by customer segmentation, airlines can implement efficient marketing strategies and customer services for different kinds of customers [1, 2]. Customer segmentation has a close relationship with formulation of marketing strategy, which helps to make a marketing promotion plan or a new product design, companies focus first on: ①According to customer behavior, customers can be divided into several groups. ②Which kind of customer will create maximum benefit for airline? ③These customers have in common characteristic. ④High-spending customers have in common characteristic. The tendency to spend money. ⑤Business life cycle and value of each group. [3] This paper analyzes characteristics of behavior and flight routes based on cluster technology, and finds out some customer groups having the same behavior. These useful conclusions help CRM become a booster which makes business successful, expands product sales and promotes optimization of marketing strategy. [4]
2 SEGMENTATION MODEL CONSTRUCTION First of all, segmentation model based on characteristics of behavior and routes should be prepared before the construction of cross-analysis; available measures should be put forward for the establishment of airline marketing.
2.1 Segmentation Variables of Customer Behavior According to these consumers behaviours such as booking, payment, check-in and flying, customer segmentation model was constructed. Modeling variables used in the model are as follows, booking behavior variable including: ratio of B2C booking, booking, agents booking, and direct point booking; payment behavior variable including ratio of bankcard payment, cash payment, other ways to pay; check-in behavior variable including: self check-in rate, SMS check-in rate, online check-in rate, counter check-in rate; flight behavior variable including: flight frequency, interval from the last time by air, ration between first class and economy class, average discount rate of economy class, average discount rate between first class and economy class, pice per kilometer, ratio of outing in the weekday, ratio of outing in the weekend, ratio of outing during holidays, ratio of outing by team.
2.2 Segmentation Variables of Flight Routes After statistical data analysis, according to the size of customer traffic, these flight routes are sorted in descending - 23 -