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Australia’s largest entertainment centre operator, Timezone, is using leading edge business insights tools to select high-value store locations.
As Timezone approaches its 40th Birthday, the business remains firmly committed to providing families and friends with a memorable social experience across its 23 centres nation-wide.
While the businesses’ image and layout has kept pace with the demands of a modern shopping centre experience, behind the physical centres Timezone is tapping into customer data and insights to develop a growing, loyal customer base.
Timezone’s General Manager, Kane Fong, says that the huge shift towards out of home entertainment provides an opportunity for Timezone to continue rolling out centres, particularly given shopping centre owners are focused on offering their customers the latest leisure experiences.
For Timezone, the success of new stores is no coincidence. Selecting a store location and effectively marketing to local customers is based on analysing where they are located, how much they spend, potential for repeat purchases, and whether they could take business away from existing centres.
To better understand these trends, Timezone combines insights from its own customer spending patterns through registration and membership programs, with CommBank’s online business insights tool, Daily IQ.
“We are really interested in the demographic data on our own customers that Daily IQ can provide. We already know our customer base is very broad, but understanding whether or not to target a particular age group or location can really help us increase how effectively we market ourselves,” Kane says.
Using these insights to understand where customer groups are located has redefined the traditional catchment areas for Timezone’s operations. Using Daily IQ, the business quickly realised that a 5 or 10km radius around the centre didn’t accurately reflect where their customers were coming from.
“Daily IQ’s breakdown and heat maps of our customer base in certain locations showed us that major transport interchanges shaped our catchment area. That has changed the way we look at local marketing initiatives.”
Timezone has opened 7 new centres in the last 12 months and has a strong pipeline of new locations planned. With a large footprint, Kane and his team also look closely at the spending patterns, repeat purchases, and demographics of existing centres when planning new openings.
Kane explains that considering the impact on existing stores is equally as important.
“We used the Daily IQ customer location data to understand the impact of opening a new centre in Macquarie in Sydney, where we already had a location in nearby Hornsby.
“We had confidence to determine that there was minimal overlap between the catchment areas of the two centres, and in fact have opened up a new customer base.”
When launching the Macquarie store, Kane says the team had also assumed that the local student population would be target customers, and Timezone used both its own data and Daily IQ to validate this assumption.
“What we saw was customers aged between 20 and 24 years were much higher than in our other locations. That verified that we are getting the university students into the centre. This allowed us to tailor our promotional activities to this market, and precisely measure its success,” Kane says.
“Insights into our customers and how we target them with the most relevant marketing campaign is very valuable. We also leverage Daily IQ to better understand customer behaviours such as average spend per visit, and repeat visits, and then monitor weekly, monthly and quarterly to see whether it’s working effectively.”
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