marketing

Mastering The New Five P’s of Marketing – Tom Patty on How Not to be a Casualty of the Revolution

by RobertKCole on November 3, 2010

In the mid 1990′s, Tom Patty, President and World Wide Account Director for Chiat/Day, the hottest advertising agency of its time, authored a superlative treatise on the urgent changes necessary for marketing to be viable in times of dramatic change.

Casualty of the Revolution
Creative Commons License photo credit: ScaredyCatPhotographer

Don't be a Casualty of the Revolution. The travel industry should have been listening 15 years ago. Apple was.

He even addressed the topic to the travel industry when he presented the keynote address at the 1995 Travel and Tourism Research Association meeting in Bal Harbour, Florida. His target? Marketing’s venerable Five P’s:

  • Product
  • Price
  • Packaging
  • Place
  • Promotion

If you were thinking there were only Four P’s (excluding packaging) you are really out of touch. The Four P’s were introduced as the key elements of the marketing mix in 1960 – times have changed… your business school really should have invested in new textbooks.

If you happen to be a bit more cutting-edge, you may even subscribe to the concept of adding a Sixth P – People – to the mix. (This has been an integral component for social computing strategists.)

Fifteen years ago however, Patty proposed that a completely new approach to marketing was required to shift from a product orientation to a brand orientation.

He highlighted four key factors necessitating the need for marketing revolution -

  • Globalization of Competition
  • Real-time Technology
  • The Demand for Agile Management
  • Changing Economic Structures

Those issues sound a lot more like 2010 than 1995.

So, with the 2010 PhoCusWright Conference‘s theme “Chaos Calls, Navigating the New,” there is no better time to revisit Patty’s wholly original and still relevant case that the New Five P’s should be:

  • Paradox
  • Perspective
  • Paradigm
  • Persuasion
  • Passion

After successive acquisitions, site updates and the passage of time, the original Chiat/Day website and Patty’s inspirational document has seemed to have eluded Google’s extensive index.

As a public service, the document has been recreated in its entirety from an old printed copy from my files. Hopefully the document will provide marketers with a renewed vision of the future – not just from a 1995 perspective, but one that may be even more applicable in 2010. continue reading →

Tagged as: advertising, customer relationship management, history, innovation, insight, marketing, strategy

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Hotwire Breaks Brand Promise by Gutting Rating System

by RobertKCole on October 25, 2010

Hotwire, the opaque travel website created by Eric Grosse (Expedia President), Karl Petersen (TPG Partner), Greg Brockway (TripIt CEO) & Spencer Rascoff (Zillow CEO) was rated highest in customer satisfaction from 2006-2008 among independent travel websites by J.D. Power and Associates.

Cracked Empty Shells
Creative Commons License photo credit: DailyCraft

Eliminating specific criteria from hotel ratings leaves nothing but an empty and easily cracked brand promise.

Over the past year, I made 18 hotel bookings spanning 41 nights through Hotwire. Based on my most recent experience, however, the tenure of my loyalty is likely to be terminated. It is a shame as customer service was a traditional Hotwire strong point.

A few years ago, Hotwire made a mistake by booking me into a hotel that was incorrectly plotted on their neighborhood map. At the time, their customer care team immediately acknowledged the issue, refunded my booking, suppressed that property from being presented in the subsequent hotel search and provided a $50.00 booking credit for my troubles. The credit in particular was an unexpected and pleasant surprise.

Double Star-Crossed
My experience this week fell at the opposite end of the customer service spectrum. I booked a 3-star hotel in the Las Colinas area of Dallas for a client visit, knowing the area well and knowing that a variety of good 3-star hotels are located in that specific neighborhood. Much to my surprise, Hotwire confirmed a La Quinta.

I have no issue with La Quinta – they are a good chain that offers a consistent, quality product. The problem is that they clearly operate limited service, 2.5-star properties. If I had wanted to book a 2.5-star hotel, I could have selected that classification and paid 30% less per night.

Given Hotwire’s fundamental brand promise: a hotel matching a desired classification, located in a particular area for a specific price, I anticipated this issue could be cleared up with a simple phone call. Ultimately, Hotwire would prove that assessment to be incredibly naive. continue reading →

Tagged as: branding, customer relationship management, customer service, hospitality, hotel, Hotwire, marketing, online travel companies, strategy, travel

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Day 2 Highlights – 2010 Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference

by RobertKCole on June 18, 2010

An interesting thing happened on the second day of the Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference in Boston. Day 1 had summoned in the Summer of Love for social media in travel; Speakers and audience members alike were abuzz with the potential of tapping into social graphs, engaging with customers and increasing the relevance of customer touch-points. Day 2 introduced a healthy dose of skepticism and pragmatism to the mix.

Association of Travel Marketing Executives

The 2010 Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference was held at the The Hyatt Regency Cambridge June 15-16, 2010

Allow me to provide a bit of commentary before summarizing the highlights.

Two keynoters in particular provided some stark contrast to the unabashed optimism of the previous day. First, Brett Keller, Priceline CMO casually asked “Social is a little hyped up, don’t you think?” What a buzzkill…

Later, Wyndham Worldwide EVP Marketing Flo Lugli closed her talk by describing a fundamental function of her job: protecting her team from the distraction of new revenue generating projects. Total bummer…

Actually, framing these two talks with the rest of the conference landscape provided a complete picture of the state of travel industry marketing. That last comment in no way takes anything away from the great content and outstanding presentations provided by Henry Harteveldt, Susan Black and the other presenters; quite the contrary.

Because of the quality information provided throughout the breadth of the conference, the Priceline and Wyndham perspectives provided critical insights into the challenges facing the industry. continue reading →

Tagged as: airline, hotel, innovation, marketing, online travel companies, social media, technology, travel

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Day 1 Highlights – 2010 Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference

by RobertKCole on June 16, 2010

One sure sign of a travel industry resurgence is growing conference attendance. While group meetings represent a critically important sector for the travel industry, there may be no more important litmus test of the travel industry than travel marketers spending money to attend their own industry conference.

Hyatt Regency Cambridge

The Hyatt Regency Cambridge hosted the 2010 Association of Travel Marketing Executives Conference June 15-16, 2010

I am happy to report that attendance at the 2010 Association of Travel Marketing Executives Travel Marketing Conference exceeded the 2009 count by 50%. If travel marketers are spending money and traveling, that is a very good sign.

“The New Now & The New Next” aptly describes the agenda, covering social media, digital advertising, and new developments in the search and user generated content.

ATME Chairman Joel Chusid welcomed the audience, set the stage and wasted no time in getting straight into the program.

Forrester Research Vice President Henry Harteveldt provided his typical tsunami of insightful and statistically based observations and predictions: continue reading →

Tagged as: airline, hotel, innovation, marketing, online travel companies, social media, technology, travel

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Multiple Persona, Trip-centric Travel Has a Name – EveryYou

by RobertKCole on October 21, 2009

About six weeks ago, Tim Hughes introduced his concept of travel individuation on his Business Of Online Travel blog. He titled it EveryYou. In a nutshell, EveryYou applies persona-based marketing to the unique needs associated with different types of trips that a traveler may experience.

For example, business trips, family vacations and a couple’s weekend getaway would all potentially have very different criteria impacting the consumer’s decision making process. EveryYou extends one-to-one marketing and long tail niche business strategies to envision a highly engaged customer relationship that enables travel marketers to promote highly relevant product tailored for a specific itinerary in a timely and efficient manner.

Multiple Personas
Creative Commons License photo credit: Spigoo

Travelers may have a persona for every trip, but the challenge for travel marketers will be to successfully promote a trip for every persona.

Tim intended to give this presentation at the Web in Travel Conference, held in conjunction with ITB Asia in Singapore this week, but was unfortunately waylaid by a back ailment. The good news is that he recorded a podcast of the presentation.

Tim’s hypothesis is dead-on target; the future of online travel lives with persona-based, trip-centric marketing.

Due to the greater degree of relationship longevity and customer engagement associated with traditional travel agent / client relationships, this has always been an aspect where a quality professional travel agent could beat an online travel site. A great travel agent can recommend a great trip itinerary that satisfies needs a traveler may not have even realized existed.

Recommendation engines and persona marketing have been a personal interest for a long time. A decade ago I worked with the Sabre Labs team on a collaborative filtering project using the same underlying technology that powers Amazon’s recommendation engine – with fascinating results.

Even with extremely small samples (50 people, 25 ratings each) we found the recommendation algorithm could be tweaked to produce 94% accuracy – not too bad for a first generation proof of concept.

Unfortunately, the Achilles-heel was that there needed to be consideration of the specific trip purpose, or traveler persona, introduced into the process to provide accurate situational recommendations. Presumably, the attributes associated with each of the multiple personas could be derived through a soft and hard filtering process based on both expressed and implied (experiential) information streams. The challenge would be getting access to this highly personalized and voluminous information. Between the explosion of computing power now available to consumers and the advent of social networking, the fundamental technologies now exist.

Some may argue that the principal obstacle for EveryYou is the legacy technology used by so many groups within the travel industry, the high degree of fragmentation within the travel industry, or the massive amount of data required to create and present relevant recommendations. I disagree – there is a larger and much more challenging issue – travel industry culture and many incumbents’ inherent fear of change. continue reading →

Tagged as: customer relationship management, innovation, marketing, personas, travel

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Marketing Your Hotel or Resort in a Web 2.0 World – Presentation at HFTP Annual Convention

by RobertKCole on September 28, 2009

Here’s my presentation on “Marketing Your Hotel or Resort in a Web 2.0 World” from the Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals (HFTP) Annual Convention & Tradeshow, held at Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas. With a 75 minute time slot and about 7.5 days of potential content, the attendees got an opportunity to sip from the fire hose of marketing strategy and web technology.

Web 2.0 Sites and TechnologiesCreative Commons License photo credit: pipeapple

An ever growing list of new Web 2.0 sites and technologies distract the Hotelier trying to focus on profitably filling rooms.

Due to the time constraints, there was not much opportunity to discuss the critical need for alignment between online and offline marketing tactics. The full presentation is embedded below, but for those who are not flash-enabled (hey mobile browser developers, let’s follow Skyfire’s lead & get this done, shall we?) here are some of the highlights:

One key takeaway was straightforward – to be successful, marketing strategy must drive technology and channel decisions. Hoteliers need to avoid getting caught in the slipstream of the rush to use the latest and hottest tools. This does not mean new tools should not be considered or used; just that the marketing strategy and technology tool must work together to provide a specific guest benefit. continue reading →

Tagged as: HFTP, hotel, marketing, marketing strategy, social media, travel, Web 2.0

3 comments