joshuakelly.com » marketing

Hotel Web Sites: Your Site Is Your Brand

joshuakelly — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:14:14 +0000

[Written For The FINE Folks at FINE

Appearing Online At:

http://www.finedesigngroup.com/words/hotel.html

hospitalitynet.org|View

wiredhotelier.com|View

HSMAI eCONNECT|View

HSMAI.org (europe)|View

The Internet has revolutionized hospitality as much as it has revolutionized any industry. Yet even as the Web gains importance as a sales channel for business like hotels and restaurants, it’s changing fundamentally in terms of what consumers expect from it.

Put simply, the bar is being raised yet again.

In 2008, up to 40% of all hotel bookings in North America will be generated from the Internet. Another 25-30% of hotel bookings will be directly influenced by online research, but booked offline. By 2010 the Internet will contribute over 45% of all hotel bookings in North America.*

Meanwhile, the GDS-backed early leaders in the online travel space are losing ground to direct sales and now account for less than 20% of online bookings. Translation: people are increasingly going direct to the brand source for in-depth information, not to online “travel agents”.

Perhaps most importantly, the general level of consumer Internet-savvy, bandwidth, and technology are all reaching levels that stretch consumer expectations of how a hotel site should look, feel, and function. It’s not enough to just offer the ability to check rates and availability anymore.

What this all means is that attaching legacy concepts about hotel sales, marketing and distribution channels to a website is a big mistake. Is a website an ad, a booking engine, a customer service vehicle, a property tour, a trusted source of local information, a direct mail piece, a loyalty club, a salesperson? Of course, the answer is all of the above.

The functional tools now available to support websites as distribution channels are extensive and well-established enough to use acronyms: SEO, CRM, CMSs, TPIs. But these tools all need to be evaluated and incorporated within the context of the bigger picture: your website is your brand. Done right, it will be built and operated from the perspective of the consumer experience first, and all of the attending support mechanisms second.

Perhaps the closest single analogy for what a hotel website is and does is to simply think of this “virtual location” as an extension of the physical locations. Outside of their experience on your property with your people, there is no more significant brand touchpoint for your customers than your website.

If you accept the premise that a site is a branding tool, here are some key points to consider for the approximately 15% of the hospitality industry that’s planning a re-launch in the next year:
1.    Make both a sale and a customer. A website is part transactional engine measured by conversion rates, part relationship engine measured by “wow” factor and qualitative research.
2.    Think inside out. A website tells your own staff as much about who you are as it does your customers. Is it a reflection of how you want them to conduct themselves? Is its maintenance and updating integrated with their workflow?
3.    On-site means on site. Think of the experience on your website the same way you think about the experience on your property. Consumers lump all these perceptions together, so should you.
4.    Your site is your brand. Nothing challenges whether you have your brand positioned clearly better than a website. Consumers can open up your site and your three competitors in separate tabs and compare them in seconds. What is your point of difference?

Two strong examples of these principles in application are Joie de Vivre Hotels, and Francis Ford Coppola Resorts.

Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the California boutique hotelier, re-launched their website in 2007 at www.jdvhotels.com. With a focused new brand strategy to take full ownership of their guest’s entire California vacation, their thinking went beyond the simple online or in-room experience. Dramatic California imagery and dynamic design elements introduce the idea that Joie de Vivre is about California. They provide tools to help build a trip itinerary full of specific activities in each property’s area, and even locate knowledgeable locals to show you around. Finally, they match guests with the perfect choice from among their 29 California properties using a Hotel Matchmaker search tool that allows you to choose a property much like you would choose a friend.

The 2005 Francis Ford Coppola Resorts website aimed at taking you there before you get there. A trip to Belize or Guatemala is a leap of faith. Word of mouth is essential, but so is a totally immersing website that makes you feel the full romance of the location. This site using analog materials centered around a web representation of Coppola’s desk and scrapbooks from his visits to these resort locations to bring prospective guests into the experience, and build confidence in booking.

Using these two projects as an example, it’s clear that a good website approach needs to be organizationally collaborative, particularly between the often wildly disparate concerns of design and branding and technology and IT. Unless these varied concerns are merged, the result will be something that reaches only a portion of the Web’s potential, and a portion of the expectations of the customer.

As hospitality websites enter the next phase of sophistication and competition, more companies are viewing them as assets, much as they would a piece of property or infrastructure. Some contend a hotel’s (or hotels’) valuation can be influenced 10 to 20% by a winning website approach. While this number may be up for debate, one principal is increasingly clear: websites are now a critical branding tool for the hospitality industry.

* 2007 HeBS Benchmark Survey (www.hospitalityebusiness.com/dyn/hebsReports_coll49.php)
- – -
Josh Kelly is Principal and Chief Strategist for FINE Design Group, a design and technology firm with offices in San Francisco and Portland. FINE combines technology and strategy capabilities with traditional design craftsmanship to help clients differentiate and dramatize their brands.

Minglefish – Now in Beta

joshuakelly — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:23:23 +0000

Soon, you will be able to swim with the Minglefishers.

Integrated: Re-birth of A Buzzword

joshuakelly — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:14:10 +0000

Or Here: http://www.finedesigngroup.com/words/integrated.html

Integrated: Re-birth Of A Buzzword

Don’t Hate This Word Because It’s Beautiful

By Josh Kelly, FINE Design Group

Unsupervised words decay over time. For instance, nobody’s been watching as the word “integrated” erodes into the verbiage equivalent of a once-great magician who now plays The Pocono’s and shills Prime Rib dinners. It makes shameless appearances as an agency cross-sales tool, validating the sorcery of coordinated marketing tactics that kinda sorta fit together somehow.

Let’s bring it back to its previous glory. Let’s do it such that, by the end of this article, it turns out thoughtful, strategic design services are very important. You will leave feeling your dollars are well spent in this department – perhaps you should even spend more. No slight of hand here; you get the agenda right up front.

I can be so overt because a long-forgotten, powerful premise supports me. Integrated marketing, and its corollary, integrated design, is based on an irrefutable truth that was perhaps never widely understood: integration refers to an effect, not a cause. Put simply, the audience does the integrating, and design helps them do it.

Whether you decide to proactively manage the process or not, your customers coalesce visual cues, experiences, impressions, and all sorts of information into a set of associations regarding your company and its products. The goal of building a brand is to effectively use these associations to secure a piece of your customers’ cranial real estate so that each time you talk to them you don’t have to say things like “Hi, my name is COMPANY, I sell PRODUCT, and there are lots of REASONS you should trust me more than COMPETITOR.”

Also, building a brand enables you to be wildly successful charging $5 for a cup of coffee.

The audience does the integrating, and design helps them do it.

Design is a principal tool in manifesting your brand’s core attributes and messages. It goes well beyond nice logos. The appearance of your website, packaging, advertising, retail locations, collateral, and any other contact points at your control all come together to create the visual point of reference to which your customers attach non-visual information. Design literally creates the focal point for integration.

Yet despite the military efficiency marketing lingo suggests (“targets”, “tactics”, “campaigns”), no company gets to fully dictate what happens in their customer’s minds. A well-conceived and, perhaps above all, consistent design approach is among the few variables a company can actually thoroughly control. Without this reliable air cover, the rest of the brand-building process is risky, dependent upon factors like the demeanor of front line employees, competitive product innovation, even the price of raw materials.

Sometimes it’s instructive to imagine that every contact you have with all your customers takes place through one guy, a salesman named Joe. This would significantly reduce the complexity involved with managing customer impressions. But the pressure on Joe would be tremendous. He could do everything right, but if he shows up for meetings with Fortune 500 companies sporting a mullet haircut and overalls, then scribbles his phone number on squares of toilet paper as a leave-behind, well, your company may not get the business. Don’t let the complexity of managing many more variables than just Joe dissuade you from providing customers strong, unified, visual evidence.

At best, failure to create and apply appropriate design standards through all contact opportunities means a failure to establish a common visual platform for customer relationships. At worst, it fosters a negative context. The important thing to understand is that failing to decide is a decision in itself. Either you (or your designated agency) must step in and manage design proactively, or your customers will do it for you. And they probably don’t care about your company or its products as much as you do.

It’s okay to value some marketing expense based on click-throughs or calls to your 1-800 number. But if you’re not simultaneously valuing the contribution to brand equity, building an asset that pays dividends when the phone stops ringing, you are wasting dollars. Reinventing your look and feel with every package, site, or print ad you do, for instance, is a good way to shift your company toward a purely infomercial model. Your product development roadmap should perhaps re-focus on handy kitchen gizmos, portable exercise devices, and no money down real estate courses. You’d still need strong design, but it would only require a 30-minute shelf life.

So we can rescue this downtrodden word from its near-death state and apply it to the important work of using design to manage touch points that impact customer’s integration process. Or, we can make up fancy new terminology (“unified design theory”, or “symbiotic perceptual amalgams” have a certain drama, but I vote for something timeless like “smart and consistent design”). Either way, the choice is between a conscious decision with potential long-term benefits or the idle hope that your outreach might result in more than just another contribution to ambient noise.

______

Josh Kelly is a Principal at FINE Design Group, a design and communications firm with offices in San Francisco and Portland. FINE combines technology and strategy capabilities with traditional design expertise to help clients differentiate and dramatize their brands through web, print, and corporate identity projects.

Weaving. Like Integrated Marketing, Except with Straw.

They’re Rich And You’re Not

joshuakelly — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:01:33 +0000

Brand Marketing And The Affluent

Also Here: http://www.finedesigngroup.com/words/theyrerich.html

Perhaps you don’t know any rich people and get few opportunities to observe them in their natural habitat. Their mysterious ways stymie your formulation of evil genius-caliber marketing plans to separate them from their surplus funds. This is an especially big problem if wealthy people are the only ones who can actually afford the products you sell.

There are two cornerstones of accepted wisdom about the affluent that may help.

First, being rich is as effortless as it is fabulous. It’s all velvet chairs, fluffed ascots, caviar dollops, and periodic urges to stir up high society scandal to fight the ennui that comes from never truly needing to get out of bed. Fortunes are amassed either through accident of birth, or as a by-product of living as though civil and scientific laws don’t apply.

Second, being rich may be fabulous, but it’s no fun. The rich secretly envy the simple pleasures that necessity invents. They long to sneak down to the ship’s lower decks and dance with the scruffy folk in steerage. Their luxuries insulate them from awareness of how miserable they truly are, and they will buy anything if it supports this illusion. During temporary lulls in the acquisition of furs, thoroughbreds, and boats with putting greens, they find comfort in decadent innovations, such as bathrooms wallpapered with 100-dollar bills. The richer the person, the poorer the soul!

In other words, they’re myths.

One of the great dangers in defining brands and markets is to reduce customers to caricatures. Marketing to the affluent is especially susceptible to this because our observation of this segment has so much to do with our own measurement of ourselves. These powerful myths perform the dual social purposes of inspiring us to strive and consoling us when we fall short. So the first step in learning how to market to the affluent is to admit you have a problem.

The next step is to understand that affluence is a broad market category within which there is variation even as to the definition of affluence.

Measured against worldwide standards, the 14% of U.S. households that haul in $100,000 or more per year could be considered affluent, even though they may not be in the market for your vacation property or timeshare jet. But expanding to a global view, the truly wealthy can be segmented between the “Sorta Rich,” the 16.7 Million people around the world who have scraped together at least $1 Million, and segments of 600,000 “Super Rich” who’ve amassed a $5-500 Million net worth (The Luxury Institute, The Luxury Consumer Market, 2006).

At the far right of the number line are the world’s 2,000 some odd Billionaires. If they want your products, they’ll buy your company. Ignore them unless you are marketing sleds named “Rosebud”.

The next thing to understand is that rich people often don’t think of themselves as rich. Many of them made their own money, and still worry about the same things as the non-wealthy – like how to make more money. One study showed that 73.6% of people with $1 Million “were worried about how to become wealthy”. (Prince & Associates, 2007). For every silver spoon, there are four golden gooses that haven’t had enough time to get used to the idea of wealth – stop thinking of them as Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island.

Yet, there are some existing conceptions about the wealthy that hold true. They are no strangers to luxury travel, entertainment, jewelry, and designer fashion. They believe in indulging in life’s pleasures, even if they do not do so as frivolously as you may think.

But what defines this group (especially if you’re asking them and not yourself) is not just a stereotypical attachment to style, but an underlying appreciation of substance. Here are five ways to apply that insight to your brand marketing efforts:

1. If you build it, they will come. Marketers often look upon this “Field of Dreams” quote with derision. But with this group it makes sense. They have the luxury of discernment, and use that to focus on all the details that characterize quality products. If the product and the entire experience that surrounds it aren’t wholly compelling, no amount of marketing savvy will compensate. Instead of skimping on the ratio of palm trees to people, for instance, your posh resort should be able to claim more palms per capita. All the amenities and marketing materials should be designed with the same principal. Think of extra investment in designing, branding, and servicing these products as commensurate with the cost per acquisition of a customer with 10, 20, 100 times the spending power.
2. Reach them where they live. The wealthy are easy to find, but hard to truly reach. Some modes of communication are by definition contradictory to their highly independent and interpersonal ways of gaining product knowledge. They are very well informed, but have neither the time nor the inclination to rely upon mass media sources. So while a highly customized direct marketing piece is a sure way to reach the right people, it must also carry with it the kind of messaging and design that separates it clearly from junk mail. And while carefully selected magazine placement can also help, it must be something that carries the confidence of a product that sells itself on its own merits.
3. Talk to the millionaire next door. Message them in ways that do not pander to their wealth. Selling luxury vacation property is about offering an environment where life’s true pleasures can be realized, not about bathing in caviar and comparing paparazzi horror stories. A timeshare jet is about getting you there in comfort, not about how much fun it will be to think about the bovine conditions of the slobs on commercial airlines. Enough with the ascots already.
4. Create a true brand franchise. You must think of wealthy-focused brands as a true customer franchise. It’s something that coalesces around a loyal group of customers, rather than some exercise in positioning packaged goods to the mass market. Wealthy customers can vary in age, gender, family status, hobbies, and income and must be defined and pursued on some basis other than simply their wealth. Perhaps the best way to say this is that rich people are people too.
5. Advertise on the other networks. A good way to think about how to establish a brand among the affluent is to think about how it will proliferate through interpersonal networks rather than mass ones. The wealthy find word of mouth and referrals from friends extremely important in making purchase decisions. They rely first on the evidence of their own judgment, second on the judgment of others they respect, and third on very little else. Creating messages, stories, and venues that resonate in this social context is important. Focus on creating evangelists for your brand through everything ranging from personal interaction to product demonstration. What story about your brand will carry news of it across this network?

Witnessing attempts to market to the affluent can be a bit like that feeling you get when you switch on the television in a faraway country to find that an entire culture may be getting its image of Americans from subtitled Desperate Housewives reruns. It makes you want to start a cultural exchange program. Or write an article.

Just as there are no true get rich quick schemes, there are no schemes to get rich customers quickly. Marketers who think beyond stereotypes learn that one accepted truth about this segment holds true – it turns out they do have money to spend.

Stealth Consulting Project For Nike

joshuakelly — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:59:38 +0000

I can only say it involves a revolution both in shirts and in retail promotions. I can’t tell you more than that; you might be from Puma.

Oh, alright! I can also tell you all of the names of the promotional ideas. But if you are from a certain Puma-centric athletic apparel company, avert your eyes:
1: Obviously Subliminal
2: Tides
3: 7 Days A Week
4: My New Favorite Shirt
5: Frames or An Instant Classic
6: Shadow Puppets
7: Diorama: The Multi-Tool of Athletic Wear
8: The Grocery Promotion
9: Lose Your Shirt
10: Photo Booth Dressing Room
11: Perma-shirt Syndrome
12: Christo Strikes Again
13: Robot Demo
14: Carnival Booth
15: You To A Tee
16: World Record Shirts
17: Popularity Contest
18: Your First Taste Is Free