Multi-Market ROI Analysis For An Amusement Park

  • January 22, 2025
  • Case Studies
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Challenge

A large US amusement park corporation operating across 12 DMAs was looking for a marketing measurement solution to inform their marketing strategy across media tactics and DMAs.

They had historically based marketing investment decisions on historical budgets and in a siloed fashion without any data-driven analysis around Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI).

They were looking for a solution that would provide insights and inform decision making on:

  • The return on marketing investments
  • How much marketing spend is needed to gain both short-term profits but also build long-term brand equity
  • Where incremental dollars could be spent, across:
    • DMAs – each theme park marketed to several DMAs and the parks were in different cities
    • Product/park portfolio – they had both theme parks and water parks
    • Media channels
    • Customer segments/purchase types
  • What to expect from differential levels of spend in the future, based on past results

A significant mindset shift was needed to start using tangible outputs from advanced marketing investment analysis to inform the client’s future investment strategy.

Solution

Data

Along with standard data collection for a marketing mix model (such as sales, operational factors, media activity, competitor activity, macroeconomic factors and seasonality), we collected data around brand metrics and individual park performance through guest satisfaction surveys including customer demographic characteristics to understand longer-term brand equity drivers.

Model Structure

The model structure reflected the learning needs of the business where it was essential to uncover the drivers of each purchase type in each of the DMAs where they had parks present to be able to inform media allocation across markets.

Modeling and Score Card development

Marketscience conducted a marketing effectiveness program comprising both a Marketing Mix Model and Media Scorecard consisting of relevant KPIs to inform decision making around the client’s ROMI and optimal budget setting and allocation.

Leveraging Marketscience’s unique Dynamic Linear Modeling approach the client was better able to measure the short-term impact of its marketing programs by DMA/park whilst also identifying underlying long-term trends.  An additional Vector Auto Regression model was then able to identify the customer perceptions leading to long-term brand equity for the various parks and take this into account in the subsequent budget allocation process.

Modeling Deliverables

Marketing Mix Modeling: Produced short-term ROMI metrics, which informed the media scorecard, including:

  • Model fit
  • Park paintings
  • Contribution
  • Marketing ROI

Media Scorecard: ​Single source of metrics required to make decisions regarding media spend (e.g., total media spend, media allocation), including:

  • Short-term ROMI metrics (informed by MMM)
  • Long-term ROMI metrics (e.g. brand equity KPIs)
  • Business context KPIs (e.g. category, competitive)

Optimization and Results

The outputs from the models were fed into the Marketscience SimOpt tool enabling the optimal allocation of the client’s marketing budget across DMAs and media tactics by taking into account both short-term ROMI as well as longer-term brand equity for each park.

Some of the key recommendations included:

  • Less media spend needed to target customers in the market for less committal tickets such as single day passes as opposed to those purchasing higher value items such as memberships or seasonal passes.
  • Channel mix reallocation to achieve balance between short-term profits and long-term brand growth:
    • To reach maximum short-term profits, Digital and Social investments had to be increased and TV at least maintained.
    • To achieve longer-term brand equity, TV needed to be increased as it was found to be a strong driver of brand value.
  • Budget allocation across DMAs/parks saw a clear delineation between high and low performing parks both from a ROMI perspective but also guest satisfaction and brand equity perspective linked to long-term growth.
  • 10% increase in profits was identified in the Short-Term with an extra 5% in the Long-Term.

What We Did

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