Mike Fantis, VP and Managing Director at DAC Group’s London office (www.dacgroup.com), spoke at Place Conference London about how DAC Group is using location to help NetJets in its efforts to target ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWI) — in this case, individuals worth €30M+.  While this is clearly a niche market, it is also a challenging market to target effectively as:

• Print and display are very inefficient: Which titles do we use?
• The usual suspects, like high luxury magazines/sites don’t make sense because it is a generalization. For example, Bernard Arnault, Europe’s richest person, is not at all into luxury cars (he actually drove around Paris in an armored Peugeot 205 to remain anonymous. An interesting side note, you can now buy his armored car for €25,000)
• There are no pre-set profiles of for this market on social media

Due to these challenges, DAC Group decided instead to use ‘location’ to target these individuals. More specifically, using the postcodes from NetJets’ CRM system DAC Group identifies areas within cities where there are higher concentrations of UHNWI. In addition to this, DAC Group also identified the most popular events for NetJets target market based on existing research and backed up by NetJets’ internal research. Combined, this approach is focused on delivering value through the creation of Aggregated Location Moments.

DAC Group set up hyper-local campaigns a few weeks prior to one of these events. These campaigns are focused on making the target market aware of how NetJets can get them to these events in style, while addressing all the service needs they might have to maximize their experience at the event. This is then amplified by hyper-local targeting around the actual event which dynamically illustrates to the UHNWI the exclusive experience existing NetJets customers are enjoying while there. Following the event, DAC Group designed campaigns targeting the same specific areas within the cities identified at the outset of the program and focused on communicating the amazing experiences existing NetJets customers enjoyed at those events.

As this is early days in the launch of this program, what kind of results do DAC Group and NetJets expect? There is an expectation that current NetJets owners will appreciate this activity and show interest in joining upcoming events. This will drive loyalty. There is not an expectation that there will be an immediate uptake on new clients, since shared ownership of private jets can be a multi-million-dollar decision. However, there is an expectation that the program will generate new inquiries to become a NetJets member and that these inquiries will grow over time as the program is expanded to cover more and more events.

Plans are already in place to expand this program. For example, NetJets has an exclusive partnership with Four Seasons Hotels which will be leveraged to extend the story of some of these events at local Four Seasons Hotels. More content will also be created to showcase the actual services offered by NetJets, showing their superiority vs other brands in the marketplace; and DAC group will be diving deeper in the actual travel behavior of NetJets’ clients to unlock other events where we might have aggregated moments for UHNWI.

Mike also makes the point that this approach can also be used for other audiences as well: For example, imagine you are sponsoring a music festival. Using the ticket vendor’s CRM data for the festival, you can identify the areas where there are high concentrations of festival visitors. These areas can be targeted to invite festival visitors to the exclusive experience you have created at the festival. During the festival, you showcase the amazing experience that are happening at the festival and, once you have captured content from the exclusive experiences at the festival, you can share it with your audience nation-wide.