Stillae was instrumental in assisting the UK’s #1 cinema chain, Cineworld, in making an unprecedented strategic move in its industry – changing the habits of its customers by reaching them in an increasingly relevant and targeted way, ultimately increasing frequency and improving their cinema-going experience.
Over the course of a 15-month assignment, Stillae helped build the business case, rationale and engagement with the Cineworld Executive Team, which enabled the company to make a gamechanging industry move to eliminate booking fees for cinema tickets purchased online.
The decision, alongside that of reducing the price of tickets purchased online by 10 percent, is enabling Cineworld to increase the rate of membership growth of its MyCineworld proposition. In turn, this helps the company learn more about the needs and habits of its customers and grow its market share by presenting them with compelling product offerings that better meet their needs.
“We had a vision of where we wanted to go with MyCineworld , but Stillae were instrumental in building the commercial business case required to get the Executive Team fully behind it”, said Justin Skinner, Vice President of Marketing at Cineworld.
To reach this end result, Stillae began by gaining a thorough understanding of how the different divisions of Cineworld measured performance and tracked success. This helped Stillae overcome any potential resistance ensuring all Cineworld stakeholders felt fully comfortable and confident in their new strategic approach.
In addition Stillae developed a common set of facts and assumptions regarding the dynamics of the proposed strategy, developing projections of the expected outcome using statistical tools to factor in the uncertainties. Ultimately this allowed Cineworld to define an appropriate price strategy for both the online discount and the walk-in prices. These were then tested during an eleven-month pilot in Scotland, where Cineworld eliminated the booking fee and reduced the cost of online MyCineworld tickets by 10% compared to walk-in prices. The goal of the trial was to validate the projections for speed of up-take, as well as the bottom-line financial impact on Cineworld.
