Don Neal has been tapped to serve as president of Echelon Marketing Group, a data analysis firm that builds propensity-to-purchase models based on consumers’ wealth and economic viability. Neal, who started in his position three weeks ago, replaced former president Lawrence B. Sackett.
Before joining McLean, VA-based Echelon, Neal was managing director and chief marketing officer for the Conumer & Commercial Practice division of Marsh, Inc., an insurance brokerage firm. Prior to that, he was senior vice president and marketing director for Rapp Collins Worldwide, a division of Omnicom Group. His client base included Mercedes Benz, ExxonMobile and Lowe’s Home Improvement Centers.
Echelon’s spending propensity models are based on data from IXI Corp., its parent company. IXI assembles information from 85 financial institutions on 55 million households, and aggregates the data into small, anonymous household clusters.
“Our notion is that economic insights have been buried in attitudinal and geodemographic data,” Neal told Direct Newsline. “It has been an input [when marketers design models], but it has never been fully understood or leveraged.”
Under Neal, Echelon’s mission will be to take IXI’s data, which has primarily fueled financial services marketing campaigns, and continue broadening its appeal for a wide variety of consumer markets.
