Campaign management at Harrah's Entertainment

Harrah's Entertainment is the world's largest gaming organization. Through Harrah's Total Rewards programme customers earn credits each time they visit and play. Accumulated credits are traded for rewards, cash, coupons or complementary services, and tallied to determine customer loyalty levels of gold, platinum or diamond. Associated services and privileges become increasingly valuable at each higher level.

The Total Rewards programme is a key component of Harrah's CRM strategy and underpins the company's marketing campaigns. Customer-related data, gained primarily from card use, is enriched from other data sources so that Harrah's obtains detailed understanding of his customer profiles and behaviours.

Harrah's first established a data-based marketing approach in 1998. Using historical data, which showed how often customers visited and how much they spent, these early modelling efforts provided basic segmentation based on various demographic trends. Currently Harrah's applies predictive analytics to the customer-related data which can generate an accurate estimate of each customer's potential value.

Historical data shows how often a customer visits Harrah's casinos, but predictive models will reveal which customers are also likely to visit other casinos in the market. Based on share of wallet estimates, Harrah's can target them with campaigns that attempt to increase their loyalty to Harrah's casinos. As a consequence, Harrah's was able to increase its share of customers' gaming budgets from 36 per cent in 1998 to 45 per cent in 2005.

Questions

(a) Explain the CRM strategy at Harrah's Entertainment?

(b) Making reference to theories, illustrate the development stages of customer acquisition and management processes that Harrah's Entertainment tries to establish in order to create a customer-centric enterprise.

(c) According to you, at what stage of evolution is Harrah's Entertainment Discuss fully your answer and make reference to the foundation pillars for strategic customer care.

(d) Using extensive theories, critically discuss the effectiveness of loyalty schemes in building customer loyalty in customer relationship programmes.

(e) Creating a distinction between the communication and service levels of so-called gold, platinum or diamond customers can lead to irritation among customers. How can this irritation be prevented? In your opinion, how should a company handle this situation?

(f) As the marketing manager of "Mado Cosmetics", you are asked to implement a CRM system. What are the steps necessary that you are going to initiate to implement the system?