October2009/Comment

Peter Yesawich

Marketing is not about the transaction any more – it’s about cracking the code of people’s preferences and marketing to them. Watch companies that do this, said travel guru Peter Yesawich of Ypartnership, and see how quickly their market share shifts.  Yesawich spoke to an audience of vacation ownership executives at the recent Vacation Ownership Investment Conference, sponsored by Interval International, in Orlando on Sept. 15.

A number of trends predicted just a few short years ago have now become reality, Yesawich noted. The Internet has transformed the way people access and interpret information. For one thing, there’s transparency of price, since people can now find out all available options with a couple of mouse clicks.  

“That strips the equity out of undifferentiated brands,” Yesawich said, adding that 50 per cent of airline customers don’t care about brands.  

For the lodging industry, only 44 per cent say that brand is very important.  If they’ve never heard of a hotel, they can map the location, read the reviews and make a reservation based on that information.  

These days, one in five people regularly go to blogs and one in three in the “next generation” of people actually wrote a review online.  Just two years ago, both those numbers were less than 10 per cent.  Two years ago, people would go to TripAdvisor.  Now, YouTube is the medium consulted, Yesawich added, in a trend he calls “conversational marketing”.  

It’s important to keep track of the online buzz regarding your brand.  “Check The Rip Off Report and see if your name pops up,” he advised.

We’re now dealing with what Yesawich calls “the third screen” – the first screen being television, the second the computer and the third mobile devices. Five years ago, only six per cent of people had a mobile device as their sole form of communication. Now, that figure is 19 per cent, and for those aged 25-29, the number is 35 per cent.  In Germany, many people watch an entire football match on their mobile phones. For six destinations in Western Europe, airline check in doesn’t require a boarding pass, just a swipe of your mobile phone.

And this third screen will have a dramatic effect over the next five years.  Next generation travellers are responding to “intercept marketing”.  There is a billboard ad regarding a new hotel in Las Vegas that invites people to text to obtain promotional offers.  It’s GPS driven and people can find out about two for one Cher tickets, two for one entrees, etc.

“This is no longer fictional. This is real,” said Yesawich. “All you have to do to redeem your coupon is show the maitre d’ your phone.”

Disney has mastered the art of personalization as the new service strategy.  Disney worked with Ypartnership, talking to 6,000 households to get a list of 20 top life events, a list that includes everything from graduation, to weddings to first communions.  They found, not surprisingly, that the two most important milestones were birthdays and anniversaries.  The result was an ad campaign titled “It’s the time of your life”. Disney offered to admit guests on their birthdays absolutely free starting on Jan. 1, 2010, if they registered their birthday at disneyparks.com.

Are they nuts critics may ask?  The answer is that they are not!  For every person they admit, there are five people behind them.  Each of those people stays for five nights.  The math is definitely favourable. And in one week, 3.2 million people registered their birthdays so that they could come for free in 2010.

Personalization and the third screen – are both powerful tools for marketing hotels in the coming years.