Carnival Cruise Lines bring SAS Onboard for Marketing Automation

Business Wire, April 14, 2008

SAS Serves up Deepened Customer Insight for Effective Customer Interactions, Powers Cruise Vacation Leader to Improve Yield

CARY, N.C. -- Carnival Cruise Lines selected SAS Marketing Automation to create and execute more effective customer-focused marketing campaigns. Part of the largest cruise vacation group in the world, Carnival will use SAS predictive analytics to improve customer communications, strengthen relationships and increase first-time cruiser bookings.

"We evaluated other software and no other vendor could cut the mustard in analytics and predictive modeling," said Shannon Balliet-Antorcha, Director of Database Marketing and Customer Data Integration at Carnival Cruise Lines. "SAS seems to have the advantage in predictive analytics."

An expanding cruiser market has generated industry-wide capacity growth. "We increased berths and we want more cruisers to ask travel agents to book their cruise on Carnival," said Balliet-Antorcha. "Customers appreciate Carnival's wide range of vacation choices. More effective marketing campaigns will build brand preference and contribute to filling this new capacity. Using SAS Marketing Automation, we expect a better return on marketing investment."

Improving marketing results

In the highly competitive cruise industry, sustaining top-line and bottom-line growth means everything. But manual processes for marketing campaigns limited Carnival's ability to measure results and provide relevant and timely communications with ideal cruisers. To maximize the profitability of customer relationships, Carnival needed to improve efficiency and effectiveness at each stage of the marketing process - from setting strategy and implementing campaign initiatives to measuring results.

"SAS is committed to helping fuel Carnival's cruise line industry leadership," said Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. "We appreciate sharing Carnival's vision and are pleased that SAS Marketing Automation will power their growth. All our people work to understand and meet our customers' business issues and technical requirements. It is that drive that builds trusted partnerships with our customers."

Managing timely, personalized customer communications

SAS Marketing Automation helps organizations improve response rates and revenues from marketing efforts by providing the ability to easily manage sophisticated, timely, personalized customer communication strategies. Built specifically to meet the needs of key members of the marketing process, only SAS Marketing Automation provides comprehensive data management, campaign management and advanced customer analytics in one integrated, easy-to-use solution.

SAS is delivering enterprise intelligence at Carnival through the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, integrating individual technology components in the existing information technology infrastructure into a single, unified system. The result is an information flow that transcends organizational silos, diverse computing platforms and niche tools - and delivers new insights that drive value for an organization.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 44,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions; more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; compliance with governmental regulations; research breakthroughs; and better products and processes. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW([R]). www.sas.com

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. [R] indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright (c) 2008 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.