Category Archives: TECH VIEWS

Our unique, somewhat contrarian POV on travel technology and why the world – and maybe your biz – needs TripTuner.

#FlexIn: Why Flexible Inspiration is the Future of Travel

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

The global coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed travel.  Just exactly how is debatable.  Fortunately, as the world starts to open up again we now have preliminary data to see what’s changed, and what will.

Flexibility now reigns supreme, and travelers want to know their options.  Not just any options – what’s right for them, right now.  

Relevance remains important, but many travel marketers are still stuck in a merchandising Medieval Age – pushing available offers, arranged neatly on the digital shelf.  Top sellers get prominent placement, with a few nods to personalization: places you’ve clicked on, been to or are within driving distance.  

That should be enough to capture a share of this unprecedented wave of demand, right?  

Not exactly.  There’s a revolution in travel happening right now, a tectonic change deeply rooted in a very personal, cultural and psychological shift.  The world was pulled like a rug from beneath our feet, leaving us unsettled, unsure.

Uncertainty breeds indecision.  Indecision halts action.  In e-commerce terms, it kills conversion – and drives a ton of call center interaction, as many travel sellers are reporting.

How do we remove uncertainty and get travelers to book in an ever-changing environment?  By implementing a strategy of what I call “FlexIn” – a combination of flexibility and inspiration defined as “the spontaneous generation of desirable, relevant and changeable options.”  

photo by Alexander Schimmeck

Destination Roulette

Flexibility has been one of the best changes to come to travel recently.  The ability to change or cancel a reservation without penalty is the top factor in purchase decisions, according to a recent Expedia presentation at the eTourism Summit 2021.  A recent Phocuswright research report says 7 in 10 travelers prioritize flexible booking more than ever.  It’s one change many of us hope will remain permanent.  For marketers, it’s no longer optional.

Beyond the refundable fares and eased cancellation policies, post-pandemic flexibility now applies to the very core of travel: destinations.  Specifically, destination selection.

As border restrictions, vaccine availability and adoption change, so do the list of available destinations.  Expedia also reported that on average, travelers are searching for 2 or 3 destinations in a single session.

The typical linear customer journey of selecting a destination, searching for the best price and then booking was already antiquated pre-COVID.  The funnel is morphing into a sphere – an irreversible trend accelerated by the pandemic – where travelers will consider (and even book) a number of destinations before settling on one.

The Inspiration Script, Flipped

We humans have an innate desire to explore.  Travel brands have tapped into this desire by employing attractive imagery for over 150 years.  Ethereal print ads from early U.S. railroad companies lured travelers with images of the western frontier.  At the start of the jet age, nostalgic posters of exotic destinations beckoned travelers, in the same way as Instagrammable spots drive today’s wanderlust.

Early travel ad – courtesy of University of Virginia American Studies
Rings true after all these years…

Yet somehow, the notion of inspiring travelers in the digital space has more recently been considered a frivolous pursuit.

Many industry journalists have cited the demise of travel inspiration and planning startups and projects over the years as proof.  A Skift study found that 4 out of 5 trip planning or inspiration startups failed over the 4 year period prior to 2016.

Those failures were more about execution and timing, I would argue.  Naturally, I’m also happy to say we’ve persevered against the odds: TripTuner has been converting inspiration into bookings for 10 years. Let me channel Matt Damon for a minute…

Still, there’s a lingering resistance among online travel veterans to embrace inspiration. It’s often considered to be too far from the booking.  Marketing efforts should focus further down the funnel. 

Another perception is that there’s “not enough traffic to make it worthwhile,” as the CEO of a major metasearch company once told me.  This is an inherent chicken/egg problem, where big companies may be reluctant to promote inspiration in a meaningful way because they believe there’s not enough demand for it.

Not according to Google.  They estimate that 1 in 3 travelers do not have a destination in mind when first thinking about a trip.  Ironically, the ever-increasing cost of lower-funnel keywords has also pushed brands to engage travelers earlier in the purchase process.  Inspiration is the way.

Brands Flexing Inspiration  

Savvy sellers are responding to the flexible destination demands of travelers.  CheapTickets was among the first OTAs to implement their Vacation Value Finder (powered by TripTuner, natch).  

Brands like United Airlines are getting in on the action, too with more flexible search and exploration tools (though a map crowded with labels doesn’t exactly inspire).

Regardless of who’s doing what – the best way to identify unmet demand is to test for it yourself.  In our experience with partners, every inspiration A/B test has proven its merit.  Apparently, the world’s largest travel company by market capitalization agrees.

FlexIn Your Way Forward

At the recent Skift Global Forum, airbnb CEO Brian Chesky revealed that 40% of people come to airbnb with no destination or date in mind, saying “going forward, we’re going to be in the business of inspiration.”  As a result, they’ve put a big “I’m Flexible” button as the main focal point of their home page.

Why is a separate inspiration function or Call To Action required?  It could be added to the typical flight or hotel search (enter destination, dates and travelers).  But all too often current search functions lack the spontaneity and curiosity that triggers the imagination.  The results themselves need to be inspirational (e.g with alluring images) as well as relevant.

Properly deployed, FlexIn piques a traveler’s curiosity and creates a sense of ownership, of being the author of one’s journey.  This is MY trip.  While many ideas come from within, they’re often prompted by an external stimulus (like a conversation, social media post, or email).  Without a way of channeling that inspiration, your brand simply won’t get its fair share of the rolling wave of post-pandemic pent-up demand.

The ability to spontaneously generate desirable, relevant and changeable options – which you now know as FlexIn – can future-proof your business in an ever-changing world of increasing choice and complexity.

To learn how you can convert flexible inspiration, get in touch and…stayTTuned.

The Yen for Hidden Gems: A Traveler Trends Triptych [infographics]

Posted on by
Reply

Travel’s recovery is at various stages globally, but the trend towards more authentic, off-the-beaten-path destinations, experiences and activities is universal.  Or is it?

Earlier we shared how travelers are gravitating towards more remote (and particularly outdoors) destinations, activities and beaches.  Much of the news around travel trends and some big travel startup funding reports focus on outdoor experiences. We hear about it on webinars, in posts and conversations from industry colleagues – to the point where it’s an accepted truism.

But I’m a bit of a contrarian, so just for kicks we checked to see if the remote outdoors zeitgeist was truly universal. And it is.  Kinda.

Your Social Distance May Vary

We looked at the demand for urban vs. remote destinations across the TripTuner platform, and compared it to pre-COVID levels. Breaking down the desire for more remote destinations by the top four US metropolitan areas, we can clearly see that not everyone shares the same mojo to roll solo.

The teal dots show COVID-era preferences, with white dots indicating 2019 preferences. Chicagoans had the strongest post-COVID desire to go remote (note the delta between the blue vs white dot above), while Houston’s change was less than half of that – likely because they were already more apt to do so (their white dot). New York and LA also saw significant increases of 28% and 32%, respectively.

Solo Play

We also looked at the demand for popular vs. hidden gem activities across the TripTuner platform, and compared it to pre-COVID levels.  There was a clear overall trend towards less popular activities, but it varied across the four major US metros.

Here’s how it played out:
– LA travelers are now 26% more desirous of hidden gem activities 
– New Yorkers were next at 23%
– Houston came in at 18% and Chicago just 12%

Interestingly, Chicagoans are an outlier here. While they clearly prefer more remote destinations, they are less inclined to go off-the-beaten path when it comes to activities. The other markets are more or less aligned with remote destination and activity preference levels.

Which Way To The (Uncrowded) Beach?

Beach preferences jibed with the crowd-avoidance vibe. The change in pre- vs post-COVID preferences varied as with destinations and activities.

Here again however, Chicagoans stood out in having a much higher preference for secluded beaches than hidden gem activities. Perhaps the novelty of Oak Street Beach has worn off for locals?

Your Audience May Vary

What else does this data tell us? That despite a glut of views on what the “new normal” (sorry not sorry to use that worn phrase, it’s relevant) looks like for travel, we still need to dig into the numbers and see if it makes sense for our audience and what they want.

Ideally, you can do this on an individual 1:1 level (we can help with that) by leveraging your own first-party data (more on its importance here). But as much this pandemic has changed us, it’s more critical as ever to do the math – to question your assumptions and check that they are backed by real, relevant data.

Enough with the numbers. Now let me go dream about my next remote getaway destination.

PS – we can help with that, too 🙂

Distance Lover: Traveler Demand for Open Spaces, Quantified [INFOGRAPHIC]

Posted on by
1

At first glance, this infographic may not be surprising.  The general consensus among travel experts these days is that people are opting for less crowded experiences as a result of the pandemic.  But when you start to look for data to back this up, it’s largely based on surveys or anecdotal evidence and quotes. We wanted to see what actual travelers were doing vs. saying

So we dug into the TripTuner Taste Lab. The Taste Lab is comprised of unique preference data pulled from the precise actions of users on preference slider inputs across the TripTuner platform. It’s the output of a patented process, in which the twin attributes of each slider measure the relative preference between two criteria (you can play around with it here).

In this case, we looked at the relative preference for social distancing among U.S. travelers across three categories: destinations (remote vs. urban), beaches (secluded vs. lively) and activities (hidden gems vs. popular). The base timeframe starts with the designation of a pandemic in February 2020 and runs until the first reports of a successful vaccine in November. For a pre-pandemic comparison, we took the same timeframe from 2019.

Where’s the Remote (Destination)?

As expected, Taste Lab data shows travelers prefer less crowded destinations, beaches and activities across the board. But it wasn’t the same for each type of travel experience. For destinations, in 2020 travelers were on average 22% more inclined to choose a remote destination.

This may not seem significant, however if you look at the position of the average slider preferences it shows a flip from a pre-pandemic bias towards urban locations to more remote. Of course, individual tastes will vary (and we can capture that on an individual level) but the overall sentiment shifted significantly. Remote destinations are on average, the new default.

Beach Towel Territory Battles

You know those pesky travelers who claim their territory with a beach towel sometime before you go to sleep and finish breakfast? Those battles are primed to continue, but along a different front. Instead of staking claim to a spot closest to the action, beachgoers are choosing secluded spots by 33% more than they did pre-pandemic. Despite being outdoors, distance still matters for travelers looking for their next beach vacation.

Authentic Activities at-a-Distance

When looking for activities, the general thinking is that most travelers will flock to the “must-see” experiences in a given location (looking at you, Times Square). But post-pandemic, travelers are 24% more likely to select a “hidden gem” (let’s run it back, Oiji). We’ve seen how many trends have been accelerated by COVID-19, so this too may not be surprising given the general shift toward more authentic, local experiences. Still, like the growing taste for remote destinations and secluded beaches, these changes represent a major shift in traveler activity preferences.

Moody Truths

Given the pandemic’s relative lack of booking and historical preference data, it’s imperative for travel marketers to stay closely attuned to how travelers are feeling right now, in the moment. A major shift may only be a headline away. Implementing a way to gather first-party preference data now is the best way to future-proof against the next major disruption to travel – before it becomes cliché like social distancing. To find out how, give us a holler.

Stay tuned. Be well.

Making Lemonade: Can Virtual Travel Drive Bookings?

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” 

Thanks Toa Heftiba for the could-be lemonade photo…

Making the most of a difficult situation – a.k.a. making lemonade – has been a mantra of mine since founding my own company during the last recession and weathering a barrage of critical challenges, the current pandemic being just the latest.

But what if nobody’s buying lemonade?  COVID-19 brought travel to a halt.  So why commit resources now that don’t drive immediate revenue?  

It’s an excellent question.  It makes total sense to cut non-revenue driving initiatives in a crisis.  But only – as I’ve previously said –  if it doesn’t affect the long-term viability of your business.

Pushing offers when travel is risky could come off as tone-deaf.  At the same time, businesses need to stay relevant with customers.  One way is to go through this difficult period together, by showing customer empathy: “We know you can’t or don’t want to travel right now, but here’s a way to satisfy that wanderlust.”

Virtual travel could very well be today’s lemonade.  But does it make sense to invest in such initiatives when they may not lead to immediate bookings?  We explored these questions and more in a recent AI Events webinar on virtual travel (you can view the recording here). 

Surveys of the 300+ registered attendees showed it’s no longer just a niche – 52% of respondents included virtual travel experiences as a part of marketing strategy even before COVID-19.

Poll survey graphics courtesy of AirlineInformation.org

A Polarizing Paradox

Like many issues today, marketing travel presents a polarizing paradox.  We want bookings to return, but can’t do that until people travel again.  We’d like to stimulate demand, but don’t have the resources or desire to do that until things pick up.  Initiatives must deliver revenue.

After recently claiming that virtual travel’s time has come, I heard from more than a few skeptics.  It’s not surprising.  A survey from our webinar showed only 42% of respondents planned to employ virtual travel techniques – and 44% were not sure.

As a former Online Travel Agency (OTA) executive, I get it. I have a natural bias against anything that gets in the way of a booking.  Removing friction and making it easier to buy is a key objective of any e-commerce company.  

When 360-degree virtual tours of hotel rooms first hit the scene over a decade ago, product managers bristled at how it may slow down page load speeds.  Merchandisers complained it would distract and cause would-be buyers to exit the purchase funnel.  Anything making the user experience visually richer was deemed unnecessary fluff.  At the time, I agreed.

But consumer buying patterns have changed.  The customer purchase journey as envisaged as the marketing funnel has morphed into a sphere, where the inspiration to purchase can happen anywhere and the “distance” to completing a booking is relatively consistent and short, regardless of the starting point.  

The surface of the sphere is constantly changing, like the earth’s atmosphere.  Trigger points – what I like to call Moments of Inspiration – can happen if the right conditions are present.  Like many trends, the pandemic has accelerated the morphing of the funnel into a sphere.

Inspire Now, For Bookings Later

Travelers have become more opportunistic in today’s rapidly changing environment of shifting regulations, patchwork responses and varying rates of COVID-19’s spread.  During a period of relative calm, where the origin and destination are both deemed to be ahead of the curve or recovering, a family who’s been in lockdown for months may pack up the car and escape to the great outdoors.  The more intrepid may even fly, motivated by low fares after careful weighing of the pros and cons.

In an environment where nobody’s buying, demand generation takes precedence.  When even that becomes difficult, it’s a battle for survival, to stay present in the minds of consumers who are quite literally looking to survive, too.  It’s an acid test for a brand’s reputation.

Disappearing from the conversation only ensures failure, yet overt pre-pandemic style offers are tone-deaf.  Virtual travel techniques – which I define as conveying the experience without a physical presence – offer a way to tap into the pent-up escapism of quarantined travelers in a guilt-free, low-risk manner, while generating valuable first-party preference data and leads that can convert now and later.  

A Call To Action

The main criticism of virtual travel is that it does not lead to bookings.   Engagement stats have always been there, but they are usually included with the caveat that the consumer is not in the buying mindset, they’re still “just browsing.”  Historically, the main virtual travel tools – 360 video and virtual tours – didn’t even have a “book now” or similar call to action. 

By comparison, even the oldest travel TV ad included the prompt to “call your agent.”  Virtual travel techniques missed the boat early on, but are now catching up.

Simply adding a book now button to a virtual tour isn’t enough, though.  The notoriously fickle booking habits of the online traveler cause him or her to bounce around a number of sites before booking.  Delivery mechanisms need to look at user behavior more holistically and be able to adapt to a travelers’ mood and mindset.  At TripTuner, we were able to overcome that challenge with the Florida Beach Finder project by allowing travelers to fine-tune their preferences.  

Another example is the Bahamas Island Finder.  Originally intended as an inspiration tool to help travelers explore and discover their ideal island, it has a persistent BOOK NOW button for each island that generates direct, measurable leads for nearly half of its users.  Travelers can immerse themselves in a virtual experience, yet still have the option to book at their discretion.

Re-Calibrate Your Metrics

Even with a call to action, it’s important to make sure that booking clicks – and any other actions within your virtual travel tools – are trackable.  As we saw during the webinar, 56% of respondents said they have no data to support how it translates to future revenue.

This is understandable.  Even the most sophisticated e-commerce marketers still rely upon direct, or last-click attribution: tracking bookings that come directly from a specific action or link.  As mentioned earlier, the haphazard nature of online travel bookings can make it difficult to track the customer journey.  One solution is to simply track bookings that have also included your virtual travel experience in a given session (setting a cookie to the duration of your booking window) or by a particular user.

If the current pandemic has proved one thing though, it’s that “all bets are off.”  An incredibly unpredictable business environment means we need to be prepared for any and all eventualities.  This means that traditional KPIs and success metrics may need to be suspended.

Instead of search quantity, a focus on more qualitative user data such as the types of activities, content and destinations can lay the groundwork for more effective campaigns.

In lieu of bookings (which may not recover fully for months), a brand’s connection with customers could be measured by email acquisition, social media followers or earned media.  

VISIT FLORIDA’s Beach Finder recently garnered significant earned media attention from Travel + Leisure and others for allowing home-bound travelers to virtually tour their entire coastline – even though it was initially deployed years ago.  Making virtual travel investments now can yield long-term benefits beyond the current crisis.  

Recipe for Recovery

With the right tracking, virtual travel techniques can reveal rich behavioral and preference data that can further refine your approach and offers, to generate leads and bookings.  Apart from this actual lemonade recipe, here’s your key ingredients:

  1. Help travelers escape, virtually (for now) – check out this article for a few ideas and remember – merely amassing a ton of virtual tours or imagery is not enough.  Travelers can get overwhelmed, so curation and personalization of that content becomes even more important.  
  1. Include a Call To Action – not a flashing price offer, more like “roam, if you want to…for just $X.”  Adventurous, risk-taking souls will self-select and by doing it subtly you won’t put off more cautious travelers.
  1. Right-size Your ROI – bookings are important to all travel companies, but when there are none, it’s time to re-think what success looks like in the near and long term – beyond the generic “back to normal pre-COVID levels.”

As I said at the end of the AI Events recording, “In crisis, there’s opportunity.”  Here’s to a big batch of “lemonade…that cool, refreshing drink” – for everyone.

Stay tuned, stay safe, be well.

Tedd

3 Key Marketing Paradigms for 2020 and Beyond

Posted on by
Reply

2020.  It’s how we describe perfect vision.  A clean, round number that comes around every 10 years.  It calls out for change. But vague descriptions of wanting to do more or less of something won’t do it justice.  2020 needs a clear vision as a springboard into the new decade. Here’s ours:

Customer Empathy

I wrote about this before, but it’s a concept worth repeating, clarifying and discussing.  Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen a shift from approaching customers as “prospects” to “followers” and even better, “advocates.”  The modern industrial age stipulated that product quality will help one’s business stand out from the rest while driving repeat business.  As manufacturing gave way to services, customer satisfaction grew as a way to cement loyalty.  

But as the information economy evolved, the critical element of human interaction disappeared.  We went from personal service to FAQs, Knowledge Bases and Contact forms. Companies seemed to be keeping customers at arm’s length as they strove to gain scale efficiently.  Try finding the help section on Amazon. It’s the last option, at the very bottom of the page.

Amazon’s help menu, with our notes on how customers may read it.

Amazon’s help menu, with our notes on what customers may read into it.

In some respects, that’s OK.  The mostly mobile, always-on world changed how we communicate.  We may not want to talk to an agent when we can get what we need via live chat or text.  For those who are always “crazy busy,” the perceived quickening of life’s pace may not allow time for exchanging pleasantries and small talk.  Just get me what I need, now. 

Resolving a customer’s issue quickly and on their terms does not necessarily win you loyalty, however.  It’s a minimum requirement. A ticket to play in today’s marketplace.

Marketing success in 2020 and beyond requires establishing an emotional connection with consumers – something that’s very hard to do digitally.  It requires customer empathy: “listening” to an individual’s needs or desires in the moment, based on their terms and mindset. This can be dramatically different from the targeting signals, persona or profile your company may have derived from their past behavior.

One successful e-commerce venture – Zappos – did this, ironically via the old-fashioned method of a toll-free customer service phone line.  It’s their way of establishing a “personal emotional connection” as founder Tony Hsieh put it. When Amazon bought them for $1.2 Billion, Hsieh resisted the pressure to abandon this approach.  Whereas most companies think of customer service as a generic operating expense, he saw it as marketing and has kept it to this day.

How can we engender customer empathy digitally?  It’s a complex effort that requires a clear, unified overall approach across the many interactions and micro-moments that consumers have with our brand – whether online or offline.  These interactions are opportunities to convey customer empathy by demonstrating what one’s brand stands for and believes. At TripTuner, we do that by putting the consumer in control of their preferences to discover content that is relevant to them, in the moment. 

Sphere Is The New Funnel

This was covered in great detail in a previous blog post and on stage at the Phocuswright conference.  So I won’t go much further into it other than to say that the “consumer journey” (as Ad Age Digital pointed out) isn’t a journey at all.  There is no “path to purchase” anymore because you don’t need more than a mobile phone to make a purchase, anywhere at any time.  

The ramifications of this for marketers – particularly in a world where increased privacy regulations will make traditional targeting more difficult – are significant.  It will require abandoning and un-learning years of “pushing customers down the funnel” to a purchase. Pushing! That’s not too customer empathetic, right?

Graphic showing the digital marketing funnel as a sphere.

This new paradigm will require frameworks to understand, account for and respond to the myriad interactions and combinations thereof that inspire a consumer to make a purchase.  It’s non-linear and messy, but so is life.  So there’s an added incentive for you to get it right 🙂

Inspiration is Everywhere

IF we agree that e-commerce will be increasingly frictionless – that consumers can purchase anything, anywhere at any time – THEN don’t we also have to accept the fact that the inspiration for doing so can also happen at any time, anywhere?  Instagram has become a key part of travel inspiration, to the point where someone scrolling through their feed can see a photo of a place and then switch over to book a flight on their phone while sitting through a boring meeting.

The challenge for marketers in this environment is to create ways to insert contextually-relevant brand messages into consumers’ thousands of daily digital (or physical) interactions – while providing a path to purchase, without being too commercial.  That’s quite a task, but one that is worth pursuing and one I believe will be solved this decade, if not sooner. It’s time to raise up into the Soaring 20s – let’s get to work!

Stay tuned,

Tedd

Sphere Is The New Funnel: Re-Thinking The Customer Journey

Posted on by
2

Today’s technology enables us to make purchasing decisions more quickly than ever before.  There’s an overwhelming amount of product options at our fingertips, ready for immediate purchase.  Looking up product information, reviews and price comparisons can be done in seconds.  The consumer’s journey from ideation to purchase – typically thought of in stages – has never been shorter.

Funnel Funeral

Many e-commerce marketers however, continue to view the customer journey as a linear path to a purchase – often referred to as a conversion funnel.  The funnel mirrors the increasingly smaller amount of traffic in each stage of the online buying process.  Traffic enters the wide top of the funnel and narrows as traffic drops off at each successive stage, from the upper funnel on down to the mid and lower funnel.  The narrow bottom of the funnel reflects how only about 2 out of every 100 people entering an e-commerce website make a purchase.

Using this funnel metaphor is helpful for optimizing the online purchase path, particularly for websites.  It can uncover problem areas where traffic may be bailing out due to poor user experience, design, lack of information or other reason.  But as digital traffic and activation continues to move beyond the desktop, the funnel framework becomes irrelevant.  It’s time to say goodbye to the funnel, and hello to the sphere.

The Sphere is Here

Why a sphere?  Because it best explains how consumer purchasing behavior is evolving.  Buying impulses come from anywhere – online, offline, directly or indirectly.  The vast surface of the sphere represents the expansive range of a potential customer’s physical location or state of mind.  The sparks that lead to an action along that surface mark the beginning of today’s customer journey.  I call these “Moments of Inspiration” or MOI.

The ability to make purchases from anywhere, such as on a mobile device means that consumers can hyperspace to a purchase as soon as they get a notion.  The path to purchase is equally short wherever a person is “located” along the surface of the sphere.

Not gonna lie – viewing the customer journey as a sphere burdens marketers with the impossible task of being top of mind and present everywhere.  It’s a lofty goal – but it leads to more realistic, effective marketing strategies than trying to funnel customers down a pre-defined path.  This is a major paradigm shift from the tactical optimization mindset that focuses on pushing traffic and removing barriers in a linear process of distinct stages.

Success with the sphere requires a broader effort to connect with customers in a non-sequential manner around their ever-evolving set of core beliefs, attitudes and preferences (something I refer to as the Kaleidoscope Effect, which we’ll tackle in a future post).  Such connection requires a focus on customer empathy – meeting people where they are, on their terms – another aspect represented by the surface of the sphere.

We (Marketers and Consumers) Are The World

Now that we’ve established our theory, let’s use a more recognizable sphere – Earth – as a way of understanding how this new paradigm of consumer purchasing behavior maps to the funnel stages to which we’ve grown accustomed.

For starters, take the Earth’s atmosphere.  It’s an ever-changing swirl of currents, winds and weather patterns.  As the outer layer of our marketing sphere, they are the perfect metaphor for fickle consumer tastes and trends.  Just as we check out the forecast before heading out the door each day, so to must we keep in mind the ever-changing trends that are shaping consumer tastes.  That helps establish a rapport with consumers, but it doesn’t move the needle on activation.   For that, we’ll need to have a more compelling, relevant message that reflects an individual’s particular mood which too, may change like the weather.

Journey to the Center of the Sphere

The initial idea or inspiration for a particular purchase must break through the Earth’s crust.  Think of it as an individual’s built-in armor against the thousands of irrelevant marketing message one receives daily.  Understanding the terrain of our sphere is critical to knowing whether an individual is more free-thinking like an ocean, or stubborn like a mountain range.  Cracking this code requires an increasingly sophisticated level of personalization that relies less on past behavior patterns, and more on how an individual is feeling in that moment (a.k.a. the current weather conditions).

If the inspirational impulse such as a relevant offer is strong enough, then a consumer will move into the upper funnel (the Earth’s mantle).  It’s width in the diagram above represents the myriad options one encounters after an initial idea – let’s say a desire to travel to Greece.  The interest is there but there are still many things to figure out.  Based on further information or research, the individual may move around a bit and settle on a completely different destination or perhaps just needs more time to figure out when to go, or with whom.

In the mid-funnel (or outer core of the Earth in our diagram), travelers may have finally settled on a destination but are now presented with a number of booking options.  Here again, we find increasing complexity and the freedom to veer from a direct path.  But with more focused research on price, quality and other factors it’s a shorter journey towards the center, or booking.

Perhaps most surprising of all, the Sphere recognizes that the booking doesn’t end with a single purchase.  There’s still room for more non-linear activity.  Today’s consumers demand flexibility – think free cancellation of hotel rooms or free return shipping for consumer goods.  In this more fluid view of the booking phase, there may be duplicate hotel bookings for the same trip, just to have options.  As more modes of affordable transportation arise, it may make sense to book a “throwaway” flight or bus or train segment as a placeholder to lock in a low fare even if it may not be used (if this sounds somewhat like a confession, it is 🙂

Spherical Strategies for Commercial Chaos

Now that we’ve gone deep into the core of our Sphere, we can see how difficult it can be to connect with volatile consumer behavior.  Our first reaction may be to try to take control of this commercial chaos.  Deploying one of today’s many AI-based predictive modeling tools can certainly provide more insight about consumers, and help guide them to offers.

The problem is that such solutions are often based on past behavior.  At best, they’re a rear view mirror rather than a guiding star.  They may be able to identify patterns in constructing a more personalized view of a customer, but they do not necessarily enable us to connect with an individual’s passions.  For travel marketers in particular, it’s problematic because travel is not an everyday activity, so the data points for a given person are relatively limited.

In lieu of the ability to truly personalize, marketers often create different personas to identify target segments.  These personas may even have their own purchasing journey mapped out.  But as we’ll see, such personas are static representations.  If we’re trying to connect with a person’s current state of mind and inspire them to travel, we need to provide fresh, relevant ideas about where they want to be.  We need to connect with their current aspirations, recognizing they may be in flux as they move across the surface of our sphere.

One way we capture a customer’s current mood at TripTuner is by enabling the real-time input of nuanced user preferences using our distinctive sliders.  Here’s an example of how we’ve leveraged that to activate inspiration for QATAR AIRWAYS.

Sphere Summary

Hopefully this post will spark some conversation and thoughts of your own.  At the very least, keep in mind these three key reasons why the sphere is the new funnel:

  1. Inspiration can happen anywhere.  The traditional marketing funnel assumes customers are already shopping.  The sphere captures those Moments Of Inspiration (MOI) when they decide to shop.
  2. The shopping process is not linear.  We can loosely define stages in a buying process, but it is neither sequential nor tidy.  The path from inspiration to purchase is messy, difficult and short (shout out to Hobbes).
  3. Engage consumers on their terms.  Building a funnel won’t make them come.  Meet consumers wherever they are on the surface of our sphere, physically or emotionally by connecting with their passions via relevant messages and offers.

If you’d like to learn more about applying the sphere paradigm to your online marketing, hit us up.

Till next time,  Stay Tuned!

– Tedd

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catch Us if You Can in October! CPH SFO TPA

Posted on by
Reply

Join our Founder & CEO Tedd Evers as he brings a decidedly contrarian take on things with talks at these leading travel conferences:

eTail Nordic – Copenhagen – 2-3 October

It’s a very interesting time for those in the Nordic markets.  It’s trite to say “Winter is coming,” but even though Amazon has not entered (yet), e-commerce retailers are thinking hard about how brands can survive and thrive in a changing marketplace landscape.  Tedd will chair day 2 of this e-commerce conference, moderating interesting panels on maintaining brand identity and how to ensure marketing messages are heard in a communication-weary world…and maybe squeeze in some time to check out one of Europe’s coolest cities.

eTourism Summit – San Francisco – 7-9 October

It’s time to re-think personas.  Cultural and societal norms are fragmenting at breakneck speed.  Traditional, monolithic identities are shattering, morphing into kaleidoscopic forms amid an explosion of individual expression.  Is your digital marketing framework ready?  Join Tedd and other leading destination marketers to learn about “The Kaleidoscope Effect” and much more.  Sometimes the best way to beat jet lag is to overcompensate with a longer flight in the opposite direction.  See you in SFO.

Mega Event Worldwide – St. Petersburg, FL – 29-31 October

Leading annual event for the global Airline & Travel industry dedicated to maximizing revenues from Loyalty Programs, Ancillary Revenue Generation and Co-Branded Credit Card Programs.  This year’s theme is “Engage, Experience & Execute” and Tedd will be co-presenting a customer experience case study just before heading home for Halloween so his teenage daughter can ignore him.  Yeah!

Customer Empathy and Other Less-Obvious Travel Trends

Featured

Posted on by
2

Recently, in the hallowed conference halls of Twickenham Stadium – the world’s largest rugby venue – I had the privilege of moderating a panel at the Digital Travel Summit discussing what trends will transform the travel industry over the next 5 years, and how companies may capitalize on them (spoiler alert: check the title).  I was joined by Finnbar Cornwall, Travel Industry Head at Google and Kamil Jagodzinski, the Chief Customer Officer of Kiwi.com.  The $125M richer Kiwi.com.  

DTS London 19Crystal Ball panel

Tedd, Finnbar and Kamil choppin’ it up at DTS London (IRL we’re less pixelated). Cheers Hollie Jeffries for the photo!

Nearly every conference in any industry has such sessions – so much so that they’ve become cliché.  But as some wise person told me years ago “clichés get that way for a reason,” and given what seems like the ever-quickening pace of transformational technological and societal change, it’s easy to see why “future-proofing” one’s business or indeed one’s self is so popular.

Human over Machine (for now)

Rather than move down a familiar checklist of the latest technical terms du jour (blockchain, AI, voice, AR/VR, etc) we took a different approach with this panel.  Technology is still a tool, a means to an end – and leading a discussion with technology tends to be a referendum on its merits. We wanted to focus on the broader trends that impact traveler behavior, whether they be the result of or a reaction to, new innovations.

Since one of the main themes of this conference was “Creating a Customer-Centric Journey,” we shared our thoughts on how each stage of the traditional travel booking process might change in the next 5 years.  It was done first from a traveler’s perspective, with plenty of insights for how we as travel marketers may adapt to this changing landscape.

Now, on to the main points.  Sorry, no numeric list here. It’s all about the context (and hopefully as a result for you, the Benjamins).

No Plan, No Problem

We began at the inspiration and planning phase of travel, and Kamil got us started by stating that “travel planning as we know it will disappear,” if it hasn’t already.  It’s already possible for someone to show up in a destination with little forethought and no hotel for the night – a niche that Hotel Tonight cleverly carved out for itself years ago.

Finnbar added that the increasing availability of Augmented Reality will eliminate the need to read up on an attraction, when apps like Google Lens let you point your camera and read about the story of an historic building for example.

If there’s no planning phase, “will this mean the disappearance of the booking window?” I asked, since it’s a key part of timing campaigns, offers and default search dates.

Yes and no.  As distribution, real-time pricing and merchandising capabilities continue to evolve, Kamil saw an opportunity to drive more last-minute group bookings – and perhaps the return of a last-minute distressed inventory model.

We’ve seen that model years ago with the likes of Priceline and Site59 (shameless shout out to my former squad).  But as Kamil pointed out, “Low Cost Carriers have trained travelers to book as early as possible to get the lowest airfare.”  So in that sense, booking windows will still be there if only driven by price.

So while planning the details of one’s trip may be easily put off till when you’re already there (perhaps that’s why so many trip planning startups have failed?) the actual booking – particularly for price-sensitive travelers – will likely require some forethought in order to obtain the lowest airfares.

Inspiration is Everywhere

What about the spark that starts the travel planning process?  Traditionally, the inspiration phase of the booking process has received little if only skeptical, attention (apart from a few startups who’ve tried) – mainly because it was not seen as a big enough problem (doesn’t everyone have places they want to visit?) and that it didn’t make sense to invest in since it was so many steps away from the actual booking.   This latter point makes a lot of sense given how much shopping around is done before making a purchase – Expedia states that some travelers visit up to 160 sites before booking!

But the sheer amount of choice confronting today’s travelers continues to grow (which is why I started TripTuner, to help travelers narrow down the options).  So as a brand or destination you can’t simply sit back and expect travelers to think of you, no matter how popular you are – just see how much Las Vegas advertises, for example.

Sphere is the New Funnel

It’s time to think outside the funnel, y’all!

As booking technology advances (e.g. reserve tables natively in Instagram, or book travel via chat on Facebook) the gap between inspiration and booking has shrunk tremendously.  Our panelists agreed that all you need is a few seconds on Instagram before you’re searching for flights.   What this means for brands is that you now have to think more holistically about where you are targeting travelers and remove whatever friction there is to booking along that path.  The traditional funnel has morphed into what I call the “Booking Sphere” – where it’s radius is the booking path and its surface are the various touchpoints – what I call “moments of inspiration” – leading to that booking.  Inspiration is everywhere, and savvy marketers would be wise to think of those use cases rather than over-investing in crafting clever personas.

R.I.P. Trip Planning 

Much of the inspiration happening on Instagram and other channels revolves around unique or authentic experiences.  The panel largely agreed that a sea change in travel planning behavior was facilitated by the ever-expanding amount of experiential content indexed by search engines, created by bloggers, influencers and other content marketers.  But trying to aggregate it or shoehorn the planning experience into an externally imposed, proprietary process can be considered a fool’s gold.   

The online travel landscape is littered with the carcasses of many trip planning startups over the past 10 years (the latest of which being Utrip), yet still some seek to solve the problem that everybody purports to have…with a solution they’ll never adopt.  I’ve personally felt that only Google would be able to construct a “one-stop shop” travel planning app, but even their Trips product will be sunset in August.

As more tours and activities product becomes bookable online, it will be interesting to see if a more commercially-driven “planning” product – less an itinerary builder, more of a customized, collection of bookable elements – will emerge.  As I stated in the panel, however, my vote is for the scientific principle of entropy – of things tending towards disorder.  

While there’s been some consolidation in online travel on a macro level, the larger trend will continue to be towards disorder and more specifically fragmentation – of the “types” of trips, booking sources, inventory providers and information sources.  In such a state, with technical barriers removed by the growth of the app/API economy, the only viable one-stop shop will be those brands that are: 

  1. used on a daily basis
  2. for which you already have a profile or login and most importantly, 
  3. whom you trust with your data.  

Which is why all of us on the panel felt that the main disruptive force in travel would be global players that meet those three critical criteria. 

Privacy Killed the Personalization Star

Personalization is a perennial conference topic because it’s an evolving, elusive goal.  For the online travel industry, it’s particularly difficult because the average person will only travel once or twice a year (for leisure at least).  So you can have all the machine learning and AI you want, but for true 1-1 personalization it will take a while to build up a truly complete picture of an individual’s behavior, let alone preferences.  In the absence of the frequent, nuanced conversations that a traditional travel advisor would have, it’s just damn difficult to really get a sense for traveler preferences.  

Personalization is also hard because there’s a myopia within the travel industry that results from some institutional navel-gazing.  We tend to divide each booking or trip into a given segment – corporate, leisure, family, romance – in a very rigid, binary fashion. We don’t look at travel more broadly as some of the disruptive players like Uber do: it’s whenever you leave your home.  I mean, when is the last time you saw an ad at your gas/petrol station from a destination that’s just a full tank away?

Asia’s “SuperApps” don’t seem to suffer from that problem.  They allow consumers to purchase travel along with many other goods.  With daily use, they’re able to get a much fuller picture of consumer behavior.  In addition, they are not bound by many privacy constraints such as those imposed by the GDPR.  All of us on the panel thought that this gave them a distinct advantage over western companies when it comes to personalization, brand awareness and ability to impact the entire customer booking journey.

It remains to be seen how much privacy consumers will be willing to give up in order to have companies “know us better.”  Starting with the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook debacle and other data breaches of privacy, there is a very real consumer backlash taking place.  Paradoxically however, there are also studies saying how willing consumers are to give up some privacy in order to obtain some benefit.

The way forward will require transparency though, and user control.  Companies can’t necessarily assume they have permission to use particular data on a customer.  It needs to be obvious and permission-based. 

empathy

Empathy is the path to future success. Thanks Annie Sprat for the beautiful photo.

Tell Me If You Still Care

Building empathy with consumers was a recurring theme throughout the conference, and echoed by our panelists.  Connecting with today’s consumers – and those of the future – is not just a technical solution, but rather more about one’s brand and company values.   Recent studies cited by Wunderman show that 89% of consumers are loyal to brands that share their values, and 56% are more loyal to brands that “get me” and show a deep understanding of their priorities and preferences.

Finnbar also mentioned how Google creates empathy by creating tools that assist today’s curious but impatient travelers.  As he put it, “we’re in an age of assistance.” For Kiwi.com, it’s by showing travelers a wider range of flight options so they can more easily find the best deal.  Regardless of what type of business you run, both cases provide a clear direction on how to establish empathy: through an intentional, externally focused examination of consumer behavior.  As Steve Jobs said “you’ve got to start with the customer experience, and work your way back to the technology.” I can’t think of a better way to future-proof any business.

Stay tuned.

Caught in The Optimization Loop? Prepare to be Disrupted

Posted on by
Reply

Focusing on one’s core mission is critical to any company’s success.  For startup or growth-stage companies, focus can often mean the ruthless elimination of any effort that detracts from the path that will lead to success.  At large organizations, focus means a rigid adherence to the core business process or model that got them there.

In either case, companies all too easily get caught optimizing on their core process, opening themselves up to being unexpectedly disrupted.  They think they’re innovating when they should be OUTovating.  They get caught in what I call The Optimization Loop.

spencer-watson-447779-unsplash

Big up to Spencer Watson for an image that captures our themes of a loop, focus and myopia.

Optimization is Good…Till it’s Not

Optimization in this context refers to the practice of making continuous, incremental improvements to the core aspect of a business – whether it’s conversion, performance or processes – as opposed to more large-scale, sweeping innovations.

I’m not going to argue against focus – it’s been a key part of the successful ventures with which I’ve been involved.  Finding a key metric and putting necessary resources to drive that metric is a natural part of the growth of a data-driven company.  And it’s never been easier to measure performance in so many ways.

Sophisticated algorithms and multi-variate testing schemes for example, are easy to implement and can automatically determine the right business logic, process or content for a marketing initiative.  By harnessing this rich data, we can predict with increasing precision what will drive a business outcome.

But too often metrics become a proxy for motivation – what customers really want, and why.  The problem is that data tells us about a consumer’s actions, less so about their intentions and how they perceive your brand.

Blinded by The Light…of Success

Large, successful organizations can get complacent, taking for granted why a consumer chooses their brand: “We’ve got the best selection,” or “we’re the fastest and easiest to use,” or “we’ve got the most rewarding loyalty program.”  That value proposition is reinforced, refined and optimized over and over again, in a virtuous circle – with good reason.

Such a singular focus though, can lead to strategic myopia.  It makes an enterprise increasingly vulnerable to disruption, where a new entrant seemingly comes out of nowhere to become a market leader.  Think airbnb, the largest accommodation provider in the world that didn’t even exist before 2008.

This is not a new problem – it’s well-documented in books like the seminal The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s also partly explains why large players rely upon acquisitions to scale.  Their operations and entire business model has been optimized for that singular core focus, so much so that to capture a new market demand it can’t pivot quickly enough.  In addition, with huge user bases accustomed to a certain customer experience, any change must be incremental since alienating even a small percentage of customers can significantly damage the bottom line.

Sure, they may have the resources to bring a competitive product to market quickly enough to stave off new competitors but it’s not in their DNA.  Because it’s more than the product. Just looks at Google Plus, or their soon to be shuttered Trips app.

Give The People What They Want

There are plenty of good products that never get noticed, or gain any traction.   Often it’s due to not being truly customer-centric, not understanding the value proposition.  What the consumer actually wants.

At the startup Site59, where I was part of the founding team 20 years ago, we thought we had the hottest product out there – enabling consumers to travel, go out or buy things at the last minute, at unbelievably low prices.  We featured all the hippest places, and launched (like many ventures) to the sound of crickets. No traction. No Sales. No bueno.

After conducting some interviews and surveys, we learned what travelers actually want.  They didn’t care about being at the hippest restaurant (alas, we were 20 years too early, before people took photos of their food).  They wanted to go on beach getaways and to…gulp…theme parks. Neither of these would have been a surprise to travel veterans.  But to a group of downtown NYC pre-Brooklyn 30-somethings, it was a shocker.  We were focused on and optimizing for what we thought was our core mission of spontaneous getaways and experiences.  Fortunately, we were humble enough to pivot.  Sales ramped up and within 18 months we were acquired by Travelocity.

Creating a Lean, Mean Customer-Centric Machine

This is why Lean Startup principles have gained in popularity over the past 10 years – with startups (including ours, TripTuner) as well as large corporations.  It demands that you build only what is necessary to understand if it will satisfy a real demand, measure how well it does so and then learn what you ought to have built in the first place.  It’s true user-centricity.

Mark Zuckerberg once famously asked “what is design?” But to be truly user-centric, you have to think more like a marketer than a product engineer.  Design is where ideas meet reality.

At Amazon, they don’t even think about creating a new product without first thinking of what the press release would say.  How would it be described, what problem would it solve and would it be enough to make consumers care to read about it? Entries are ruthlessly weeded out at the ideation stage by the most important criteria: would it move the needle from a consumer’s perspective?

Breaking Out of The Optimization Loop

Often larger enterprises have been optimizing so long on their core, they may miss out on the “why” part of customer behavior or disruptive new approaches.  So as a hedge, they acquire.

Acquisitions are not the only way large organizations are staving off disruption.  Many companies now have their own innovation labs, or venture arms that regularly identify, mentor and even invest in promising startups.  Another way is to partner with select technology providers that innovate outside of but are complementary to, the core business.

That’s how the major players do it.  For the rest of us, regular live user testing is one easy way to start.  You can get feedback on a new product from live users within hours.  It’s the most humbling, painful and clearest mirror one can hold up to a product.  Consumer sentiment quickly becomes very clear.  Putting up a test landing page with a modest campaign to gauge demand is yet another way.  Similar to Amazon’s press release test, you can create the copy for a proposed innovation to gauge how viable it will be, before writing even one line of code.

Both methods point to the right direction, with minimal effort and cost.  Measuring consumer sentiment – both quantitatively and qualitatively – is the right kind of optimization.  It’s also a great first step on the path to being truly customer-centric.

For Real Tho’: How Travel Marketers Think about #FOMO

Posted on by
Reply

At the Digital Travel Summit 2019 in Palm Springs, I had the opportunity to host a roundtable on the use of #FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in travel marketing.

FOMO is not new, of course.  It’s been a key ingredient in marketing campaigns since the dawn of Madison Avenue.  What’s changed is that social media’s pervasiveness has made FOMO a near-constant state of mind: an always-on reminder of what fabulous lives others (appear to) lead.

tim-trad-197273-unsplash

Shout out to Tim Trad for the FOMO- and fear-inducing image of Chicago’s Willis Tower Skydeck.

We know social media feeds aren’t a completely accurate picture of reality, but they do get our attention, elicit strong emotions…and plenty of FOMO.  According to Venngage, some 61% of young adults (aged 18-35) say that social media magnifies the FOMO they already have.

FOMO can be a strong driver of travel inspiration – I mean, who hasn’t enviously ogled photos of friends in amazing places?  So to start our session I used a quick 10-question survey to get an idea of how travel marketers themselves felt about it.

SURVEY SAYS!

Usually, I’ve found that surveys often tell us more about what respondents want us to think, rather than what they actually do.  So we could expect people will underestimate their own FOMO.  That seemed to be the case: on a scale of 0 (none) to 3 (extreme), our group of travel marketers came in at a 1 – minor FOMO.  Only 9% of respondents had major FOMO (a 2).  Nobody had extreme FOMO (phew).

Digging deeper into the results, we see social media’s FOMO power – especially when it comes to our friends.  45% of respondents indicated they were concerned about a FOMO-related scenario “all the time.”  The 4 questions that elicited the strongest indicator of FOMO were:

  • I sometimes wonder if I’m spending too much time keeping up with what is going on.
  • When I miss out on a planned get-together, it bothers me.
  • It bothers me when I miss an opportunity to meet up with friends.
  • When I’m having a good time it’s important for me to share the details online (e.g. via Facebook or Instagram)

NO MO’ FOMO?

Assured (somewhat) that our esteemed panel of travel marketers were not biased towards FOMO, we delved into the main question (to be explored more in a future post): can FOMO’s shiny marketing tactics coexist with a travel brand’s quest to keep it real and connect authentically with the largest consumer demographic, millennials?

It’s an interesting question because influencer marketing often asks consumers to be inspired by “real” images of Instagram models living curated lives against a constructed backdrop of branding, made to not look like branding.  It’s not authentic, and is arguably unethical – as seen with the Fyre Festival debacle (BTW, so happy that sweet lady got her money back).

I asked our panel of experts if they felt any tension or conflict between the need to show more authentic imagery and the need to create FOMO with swoon-worthy photos, at scale?

5 TAKEAWAYS: WHAT THE EXPERTS SAID

1.”Of course” FOMO plays a role, such as when travelers announce/post that they’ve “arrived” (both physically and metaphorically, I suppose).

2. Even though FOMO was important, it isn’t necessarily an overt marketing tactic.  More consideration is generally given to whether an influencer is paid or not.

3. Authenticity is seen as a much needed counter to more polished imagery.  One destination marketer had no issue using images of buses on a tropical island, or video of a local man cutting up coconut as a way to engage today’s travelers (vs. the proverbial stunning beach shot).

4. When it comes to influencers, many favored the use of “micro-influencers” vs. the more well-known ones…another apparent nod to authenticity.

5. For hotel marketing, it definitely works in terms of limited-time offers.  One hotelier shared how the same offer performed 2X better when its availability was reduced from 10 days to 48 hours.

GOOD FOMO MOJO

Every teachable moment needs a mnemonic: to use FOMO effectively and ethically, raise a PINT!

  • Permission-based
  • Inspiration not Perspiration (positive, not fear-based).
  • Non-manipulative
  • Truthful

FO’ MO’ INFO

Are you not entertained? Enjoy these related links to delve more deeply:

Using the Fear of Missing Out Ethically for Marketers – 60 Second Marketer

What’s Being Done to Save Wild Places from Instagram – Outside Magazine

Stop Hate-Selling to Your Customers – Rafat Ali (founder, Skift)

This is Marketing – book by Seth Godin

Stay tuned for more on this topic.  In the meantime, don’t you wish you were here? 🙂