153 - Two classic marketing errors by executives
The perfect ICP with the perfect and personalized ad. You cannot bore your customer to buying. Peninsula direct strategy is about regaining time not money. Tiktok enters hotel distribution and more.
Hello,
Incredibly this edition has almost no mentions of AI. It did concern me that it seems like the only thing I talk about, but I made no effort to avoid it. Probably just confirmation bias. I do think there’s a thread about not being boring in advertising though.
Best, Martin
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Time as the New Luxury
The Peninsula is reframing luxury not as space or service, but as control over time. Letting guests define their own schedules where the guest journey bends around the individual rather than the system. And it is a direct booking perk. Not boring advertising.
TIME LUXURY + INVISIBLE HOTEL
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. Hotels above the political noise
There’s something about the hotel industry that makes it unique. There’s a huge element of making people happier and it works. But then there’s also the fact that hotels are rare neutral spaces where different worldviews coexist. In today’s spectacle sensationalism, the “soft power” of hospitality might actually have more value than we realize.
HOSPITALITY ROLE
The AI Platform War in Hospitality
This really interesting thread on Linkedin has replies from the CEOs of both Cloudbeds and Mews. Some unpopular takes. A) unfortunately the best tech rarely wins, the best go-to-market frequently does. B) We still have very little understanding how this AI wave will land. Is agentic the way, is chat the way, is OpenAI the way or Anthropic etc. It’s hard to predict. But nobody can argue against solid APIs and data layers.
TECH PLATFORM
Google changing the Rev Mgr job?
Google’s hotel price tracking feature adds a new layer of transparency (I wonder will revenue managers be scraping that to monitor their compset analysis?). Mostly now this is going to make bad revenue management obvious. Hotels that frequently panic drop their rates 10 days out will become obvious. Google’s prediction algorithm of flight delays is pretty accurate. Will this be too?
PRICE TRACKING
Hotel Growth Tension
The best hotel brands are the smallest ones. In fact if you count all the hotel brands there are more major luxury and ultra luxury brands than upscale brands. Nobody has solved this problem yet. Rapid growth and quality standards. Software people come and claim to have fixed it, until they realize they need to reinvest millions into FF&E every few years. The US hotel industry is full hotels that seem to have been designed by a single person and desperately need a refresh (and quieter AC units).
GROWTH TRAP
TikTok Enters Hotel Distribution
TikTok testing hotel metasearch is good news for hotels. Seems they are relying on OTA integrations for now but I’m sure hotels will get access soon enough (hint Cendyn). For influencers and travel enthusiasts to be able to integrate hotels into their stories this would give them a great incentive to write more stories about other areas which aren’t the main tourist spots.
SOCIAL BOOKINGS
The Dubai reset strategy
Dubai’s decision to temporarily close and renovate flagship hotels is the smartest way to go. Timing will be everything here, but the confidence is notable. I would suggest those hotels who aren’t renovating at least make the most of this time to overhaul their tech stack and build the most guest friendly city in the world.
MARKET RESET
Entertaining Marketing
An interesting new report by Small World and Tracksuit about how marketing needs to move towards entertaining, or die. The problem is obvious, but the solution is not. On one hand entertaining is a great way to get attention and marketing is a lot about getting attention, but it is even more about getting engagement and action towards the product. We have (IMO) over optimized to the latter and lost touch with the prior as Ogilvy said, you cannot bore your customer into buying.
ENTERTAIN OR DIE WHO OWNS ATTENTION
Design, taste, opinions
So coders can design with AI, Designers can code with AI. The same goes for hotels. AI Designs are obvious from a mile away. AI coded apps probably the same when reviewed by coders (but mostly we’re not coders). So what gives. Taste and Opinions will persevere. Just like humans know when physics are off in a movie, they’ll see when the creative side was given to a machine.
SOFTWARE DESIGN
Software ate the world-ish
There are some fancy charts that show how software ate the world. Represented through market size and market cap. Seems great until you relate it to the real world. A hotel operates primarily in the physical world. Software hasn’t changed that much for hotel life. Some things are better, something are worse. But beds are beds. Guests are guests. And I suspect the majority of industries are the same. Software companies are just valued higher than before they existed.
RAILROADS VS TECH
Opinion
Two typical marketing errors
There is a pattern I keep seeing in founder and executive teams: Marketing gets switched on, budget gets deployed, a campaign goes live, invoices come in and the anxiety kicks in. Is this our ICP? Why are we paying this much per click? Can you prove that the leads come from marketing? We need to pause this until analyzed.
It seems rational but it often kills growth before it has even started.
There are two first-principle concepts in marketing that are consistently misunderstood, even by experienced managers. 1. Always start with quantity and 2. For your ads to stick you need to be accepted by the market.
Quantity comes before quality. Always. You cannot optimize something that does not exist yet. Before you refine, before you chase the perfect ICP, before you obsess over conversion rates, you need reach. How much? Well until you have a steady stream of leads that become sales, do not reduce volume. Shift the budget around to those that seem to drive best quality but now is not the time to cut. And yes, that means you will get a lot of bad leads. Tell everyone to get over it.
If you have to choose between exposure in the approximate market or highly precise targeting with minimal reach, for the same budget, the broader option is almost always the right one.
The second concept is even more fundamental. Marketing only works if there is baseline acceptance in the market. It is very hard to force demand through ads alone. If you or your product are not perceived as relevant or desirable, all ads will struggle or become extremely expensive.
Many B2B teams misunderstand “content marketing”. The goal is not primarily lead gen. Lead magnets, gated assets, and downloads are secondary outcomes. The primary job is to build goodwill, familiarity, and positioning. You are giving and sharing with the market and earning the right to advertise to them. If you get 10 downloads through a lead-magnet, it is pointless. Give the content out for free and get thousands of downloads, then advertise to them.
Not following the above, I’ve seen marketing get more and more expensive. Constant re-planning starts kicking in. Changing the people, the agency etc. Instead of holding the line and slowly pruning the spam sources. Of course, if there is zero understanding of what is working, there are cases where resetting makes sense. Stop everything, reintroduce activities one by one, and measure properly. But that is a specific approach, stuff is reintroduced fast.
Growth rarely starts with efficiency. It starts scrappy, often off-brand, and possibly even a little cringy. That’s OK - now that there’s choice you can pick the stuff that works and cut off the details that don’t. But don’t “reset” all the time.
• How Traditional TV is Changing - Link
• The inspiration Benchmark for hospitality - Link⁺
• Social media and their tobbaco problem - Link
• GDS history revisited - Link
Did you know: The word "opinion" comes from the Latin word opinio, meaning "belief" or "way of thinking." It entered English through Old French in the Middle Ages, and its basic meaning as a personal belief or judgment has stayed the same over time. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺