Aga Rayburn

Overview

The Aga Foodservice Group is a business with sales of approximately £400m, and has long been synonymous with good food and fine living. In 1929 the first Agas were imported into Britain by Bells Asbestos and Engineering. Now, 80 years later the Company has launched the innovative new 2-oven Electric Aga, which almost anyone can own. The new electric Aga is a major product launch for the Company and the industry. This product is unique and only requires a 13 amp electricity supply.

Background and objectives

With the challenging target of increasing annual sales, Aga continually needed to find ways to be more targeted, innovative and focussed with their marketing campaigns.

The main objectives of the launch were to communicate through a direct mail campaign, create awareness of the new product, generate interest and enquiries and ultimately increase sales. To do this Aga sought to target 150,000 potential customers nationwide.

The solution

Aga Rayburn have been using CACI’s proprietary ‘InSite’ Geographical Information System for the past four years - the software and associated data proved invaluable when embarking on this exercise.

Targeting the right potential customers was key. To do this a three-pronged approach was implemented. Existing Aga customers were profiled by ACORN, identifying their key characteristics. These selections were further refined geographically: using advanced shopping behaviour analysis, any prospects living outside the primary catchment areas of existing Aga stores were excluded.

The areas were further filtered using a lifestage indicator, PeopleUK, to focus down to individual level, as Aga purchasers have a distinct age and gender profile. In the resulting direct mail campaign, Aga offered a number of channels to response including telephone, coupon and website.

InSite and ACORN – mixing together the right ingredients

InSite holds at its core 1.54 million current residential UK postcodes. Each of these postcodes has been appended with CACI’s market leading ACORN geodemographic classification. ACORN (A Classification Of Residential Neighbourhoods) is built from over 400 variables of which 30% are sourced from the recent 2001 Census. The remainder were derived from CACI’s consumer lifestyle databases, which cover all of the UK’s 46 million adults and 26 million households. In essence, ACORN clusters the UK population into 56 distinct types: from Type 1, Wealthy mature professionals in large houses, to Type 56, Multi-Ethnic, Crowded Flats, allowing users to understand the characteristics and make-up of any neighbourhood.

By profiling their existing customer database of approximately 100,000 records, Aga found that certain ACORN types appeared more often than others. Not surprisingly, the wealthy rural commuter belt featured prominently as these areas have always been Aga’s prime market. However, less obvious types also appeared. For instance, affluent urban professionals living in converted flats featured strongly. Using z-scores as a measure of statistical significance, 14 ACORN types were selected for the campaign from this analysis. (Figure 1).

Figure One: Selected ACORN Types

A.1 Wealthy mature professionals, large houses

A.2 Wealthy working families with mortgages

A.3 Villages with wealthy commuters

A.4 Well-off managers, larger houses

B.5 Older affluent professionals

B.6 Farming communities

B.7 Old people, detached homes

C.9 Larger families, prosperous suburbs

C.11 Well-off managers, detached houses

C.12 Large families and houses in rural areas

D.13 Well-off professionals, larger houses and converted flats

D.14 Older professionals in detached houses and apartments

E.15 Affluent urban professionals, flats

H.27 Middle income, home owning areas

Using InSite, this ‘Aga profile’ of key customers was then applied to the whole country to determine postcode sectors containing a similar match to the target ACORN types. For each of the 9,800 sectors in the country, a measure of market potential was established and ‘hotspots’ identified. Figures 2 & 3 show the distinction between Aga’s traditional market (Types 1, 2, and 3) and the more upwardly mobile potential consumer (Types 13, 14 and 15).

Figure Two: ACORN Penetration Map of Aga traditional market

Figure Three: ACORN Penetration Map of Aga non-traditional market

Drivetimes – to be taken with a pinch of salt?

Aga has 45 stores throughout the country and wanted to include only those sectors that were within a reasonable proximity to their outlets. Rather than relying purely on drivetime catchments to determine how far prospects would be prepared to travel, the company used CACI’s Retail Footprint gravity catchment model.

This model uses sophisticated techniques in order to create a realistic catchment for over 3,300 shopping destinations; from the larger out-of-town malls such as Bluewater, to small rural centres such as Riverhead in Kent. Every postcode sector is ‘weighted’ to model the flow of expenditure to every centre. People shop at a range of different places, but are more likely to visit larger, more attractive and more accessible locations. The catchments are calibrated using millions of pounds of actual debit and credit card data so that a very accurate portrait of shopping behaviour is drawn.

Within InSite, the Aga stores were matched to Retail Footprint and the postcode sectors relating to the core catchment and target ACORN types extracted (Figure 4).

Figure Four: Key postcode sectors targeted within Tunbridge Wells store catchment

Figure 5 shows the catchment for the Tunbridge Wells store in Kent split into Primary (where 50% of the town’s expenditure is coming from), Secondary (the next 25%) and Tertiary (the next 15%). Almost half of the houses within the Tunbridge Wells footprint fall within the wealthiest ACORN category, representing a prime area to find similar Aga customers. However, 20% are also classed as ‘Urban Prosperity’, giving plenty of scope for Aga to tap into their newly identified target group.

A 40-minute drivetime would have overestimated the ‘pull’ of Tunbridge Wells, including sectors to the west of the M23, north of the M25 and east of the M20. In reality these motorways act as ‘barriers’ to an individual’s choice of destination.

Figure Five: Tunbridge Wells Retail Footprint Catchment

PeopleUK – matching the offering to people’s tastes

In order to make this mailing campaign more effective, Aga decided to target individuals rather than carrying out a traditional blanket mailing of all households within the previously selected ‘best’ postcode sectors. This enabled the message about the new product to be much more focused.

CACI’s PeopleUK (PUK) is another common dataset that is used for consumer profiling. Unlike ACORN, which is postcode-based (each postcode containing an average of 17 houses and 39 people), PUK is an individual lifestage classification. It segments every person on the Electoral Roll into one of 46 distinct types – even people within the same household can be assigned different PUK codes, true one-to-one marketing!

Aga made a considered selection of 13 key PUK types according to lifestage, age and gender characteristics dominant in their existing customer database (Figure 6) and matched this against the list of postcode sectors already identified via ACORN profiling and catchment analysis.

Figure Six: Selected PeopleUK Types

08 On the Right Track

10 School Fetes

11 Car Boot Sales

15 Telebanking Townies

19 Serious Money

20 Affluent Intelligentsia

21 Two Car Suburbia

22 Conventional Families

24 Gardens and Pets

28 Prosperous Empty Nesters

29 Young at Heart

34 The Golden Years

35 Cultured Living

A glossy leaflet was then sent to each of these 150,000 specially selected individuals promoting the new range of oven and inviting prospects to apply for a free brochure and video.

Results

As this was a brand new product launch, Aga had to be very structured in setting targets and determining how response could be benchmarked.

Aga monitored the effectiveness of the campaign against telephone calls, shop footfall, website and coupon response received in the six-week period after the mailing. They then compared these results against the same period the previous year and the six-week period prior to the campaign.

	The overall uplift of response from the campaign was double compared to previous campaigns
	Telephone calls rose 40%, and there were almost three times as many product information packs sent out from retail outlets, compared to the same period in the previous year
	Areas of the country that received the most telephone calls in this period were the specific areas targeted by the campaign – South West, Wales and North West
	Aga set to achieve 10% of their sales targets by the end of the first half of the year – in fact they were at 10% by the end of May – 114% up year on year. Caught in the halo effect, their old electric models sales were up by 59%

Conclusions

This campaign has been a major success for Aga. The use of direct mail within the retail sector is an uncommon approach, with display advertising being the norm. The benefits of this approach were demonstrated in the results and Aga has now set a benchmark for their future campaigns.

InSite and other CACI products continue to be a core part of customer targeting for Aga. Jackie Passmore, Marketing Manager of Aga-Rayburn commented,

“InSite has been an invaluable tool, the targeting of customers was key to the success of this promotion and it was done very successfully”.

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