A major RV dealer with multiple locations in the Midwest US was seeking insights into their customers and requested New Perspective’s help. Items of interest included:
- Demographic characteristics
- Geographic location
- Differences between customers from different markets/dealerships
- How customers and markets have trended over time
The client had also recently acquired a prospect list from trade show respondents, and wished to prioritize these prospects based on their likelihood to make a purchase.
To facilitate the analysis, the client provided customer records by dealer location dating back five years. These records were first geocoded to add a spatial dimension to the data, then demographic and psychographic data was appended to each customer record, finally these attributes were weighted by sales. Among the data elements appended to each customer record was a PersonicX lifestyle cluster.
Initially, New Perspective mapped the customer locations and created large, high resolution maps of each market. Typical of the RV business, customer were willing to travel a significant distance to make their RV purchase, so it was quite valuable for the client to simply see the spread of customers by dealer location. The maps were printed to poster-size sheets for display in each dealership location.
The demographic analysis yielded some surprising results for the client, while also validating some long held assumptions. For example, there were plenty of customers in the 50+ age bracket, but the client was surprised at the number of their customers that were younger than 50. Income data yielded similar surprises: the client assumed their best customers earned above average incomes but underestimated the number of customers of more modest means.
Due to the wide geographic base of customers, the sales trend analysis was completed at the county level throughout the handful of states the client served. New Perspective aggregated the sales data by county (incorporating the spatial data) to identify counties showing the greatest gain in sales over the last 5 years, as well as those counties showing the greatest drop in sales over the same time period.
With a detailed customer profile created, New Perspective geocoded and appended demographic data to the client’s prospect list. With this additional information, the client was able to prioritize the prospects that most closely resembled the best current customers. New Perspective closed the loop on the analysis by assisting with the creation of mailing lists for the target prospects.