We helped Spirit of Tasmania design a customer-centric loyalty program from the ground up
Spirit of Tasmania operates the ferry crossing between Victoria and Tasmania — a critical travel link with a wide and varied customer base. The team asked Ellipsis to develop personas grounded in segmentation and demographic insights, so marketing could become more customer-centric. The brief also included reviewing the existing loyalty program and recommending a new design backed by robust financial analysis.
Triple-method segmentation: value-based segmentation showed who matters most commercially, qualitative segmentation profiled customers demographically, and front-line staff interviews brought in operational context. Together they produced a program redesign grounded in real customer behaviour.
We ran a value-based segmentation to identify the most valuable customers — how much revenue they generate and how they actually behave. That sat alongside a qualitative segmentation that profiled customers demographically, enriched with diverse staff interviews to bring in front-line perspective on customer attributes and interactions. Separately, we assessed the current loyalty program using Return on Loyalty®, giving Spirit of Tasmania a clean financial baseline to work from.
The combined quantitative + qualitative customer insight, anchored by the Return on Loyalty® evaluation, fed directly into a new program structure. Spirit of Tasmania was able to implement many of Ellipsis's recommendations, lifting the overall customer experience inside and outside the program.
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