Case Study: A Leading Brewery

Maritz Travel helps client improve its bottom line by basing award program on a better understanding of its employees and distributors.

Situation
While the Client, a leading brewery, had traditionally used incentive programs to recognize the performance of their employees and distributors, they found the programs were not the motivating force that they thought they were. In particular, they felt that their programs were not effective at motivating their mid-level performers. They needed a way to engage and motivate a diverse community made up of internal sales, administrative employees, external distributors, drivers etc.

Solution
Maritz Travel understands the growing diversity of today’s workforce and how incentive travel programs must address those needs to be truly effective in improving the performance of the company. Many programs that were designed years ago do not address the diverse needs of today’s workforce. To eliminate this gap, Maritz Travel and Maritz Research teamed up to provide a factual approach that optimizes travel awards to address diversity, increasing motivation and moving middle performers to higher levels of achievement. The methodology utilized a Web-based survey in which the respondent viewed multiple travel program design options side-by-side, as well as a merchandise option, and selected the option they would work harder to earn. In addition, sub-sets of activities were reviewed, and respondents selected the activity they found most appealing and least appealing on an award trip.

The Client participants were divided into primary (senior and middle management, direct sales and top performing distributors) and secondary (sales support, administration, drivers etc) groups. Each group received a survey which included incentive options appropriate to their roles in the organization.

The surveys examined: 15 attributes (trip length, hotel type, destination, etc.); 17 activities (golf, Super Bowl, NASCAR events, leisure time, etc.); Importance of the attributes - their relative impact; “Utilities,” the economic name for the quantified value of the program elements; and, included a simulator model that provides the ability to compare different potential travel incentive programs “head to head.” The survey took an average of 20 minutes to complete. Fifty percent of respondents indicated they had not particpated in a program before.

Results
Because of the predictive modeling, the Client now has the knowledge of which program elements and activities are most meaningful to their participant groups. The resulting data were sorted by demographic and firmographic segments (internal Client employee vs. distributor employees, those with children, age groups, position, region, etc) allowing the Client to identify the optimal trip structure to maximize incentive dollar spend and improve the performance of individual groups within a company, effectively motivating the middle 80 percent of the workforce to achieve higher levels of performance.