Segmenting the Consumer Market for Future Business Growth in the Ancillary Category​

Our client, a low-cost airline, was seeking to gain a greater understanding of the travel and consumption behavior of Japanese, and their engagement with loyalty programs in an attempt to segment the overall market. In addition, the team was ready to test a range of goods and service venture ideas and wanted to learn which segment would show the highest acceptance, likeliness to purchase and willingness to pay for these in addition.

• Qualitative – Consumer in-depth interviews to surface emotional and functional needs related to existing and potentially new airline offers, identify customer journeys and explore attitudes and drivers/barriers across the competitor landscape and existing loyalty membership programs​
• A Stop&Think! session between the qualitative and quantitative stage allowed stakeholders from the local team as well as from the headquarter to refocus efforts due to the high impact business decisions that were pending on the research results; the mini-workshop brought the learnings together and informed the development of the quant questionnaire and initial concept ideas​
• Quantitative segmentation – Quantifying consumer needs, purchase behaviors, identifying and profiling key market segments (clustered on key needs as well as demography and psychography)

• Results from the qual helped to improve the development of the ‘right’ attributes in consumer language for the questionnaire but more importantly to avoid interpretation mistakes that can occur with quant ​
• Refined activation ideas, which were uniquely targeted to retain the loyalty program membership or drive high potential segments into it by catering towards their specific needs, triggers and barriers