Tell Newsletter #63
On branding in the hotel industry and resources to build one. Booking is still a bit of a frenemy to hotels. Tiktok in hotels and some ideas for AI in the hotel industry (some things actually work).
Hello ,
Here’s the newsletter, themed on branding. Got motivated by the Manifesto Writing site that I’m sharing as the first article. So much great inspiration in there, if you’re considering reviewing your company’s mission statement or the brand manifesto. Spend some time in there and get yourself inspired. Considering the state of brands in the hotel industry, it could do with a lot of use.
Best, Martin
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 – also it is the most read hotel newsletter in Europe.
Writing a Brand Manifesto
As I’ve written so many times before, I believe the brand is the key to any long term success of a company. It’s the one thing that can’t be commoditized, the one big (though elusive) asset that makes a company able to command rates and a “moat”. It starts with a product, but it grows into a brand. This brilliant resource in manifesto writing with plenty of examples from other brands is one every hotel brand should keep and work with.
MANIFESTO WRITING
Could this be TV Ads for Hotels
Google is expanding into the fast-growing free streaming TV market (newTV), bringing tailored advertising to over 125 live channels on smart TVs and streaming devices using Google TV. With a significant active user base across Google TV and Android TV OS, and a sizable monthly audience on YouTube's living room presence, the advertising opportunities for brands are notably expanded. There's a potential for hotels to leverage this by advertising on these targeted channels to reach potential guests, especially considering the high engagement rates of streaming platforms. TV ads have traditionally been broad and only available to the huge budgets. That could be changing, giving hotels the possibility to advertise at the inspiration stage. Of course we do need to factor in the cost of making a good TV ad.
STREAMING GOOGLE ADS EXPANSION
Booking’s prepayment debacle
Booking.com's termination of prepayment policies in various countries brings challenges to hotel revenue managers who relied on these policies to attract price-sensitive clients and ensure guaranteed reservations while benefiting from improved cash flow. One can argue that this is a win for hotels as giving too much control to the largest OTA isn’t a great idea. But it is a loss for the guest who currently needs to enter /give their credit card three times for each booking. Something that –much like old-school hotel website+booking engine– is brushed under the carpet as the norm. My take on this is that Booking has a trust issue with their “partners”. They could fix a lot of the payments problems, if they could just work out a way that is great for hotels and for guests.
PREPAYMENT POLICY CHANGES
Sustainable mobility
In Europe there was nearly 3.2 million new registrations of electric vehicles in 2023. New startups have grown across Europe to accelerate this. These companies, from Barcelona to Berlin and London to Oslo, founded between 2020 and 2022, have collectively raised hundreds of millions of euros to advance their eco-friendly mobility missions. For the hotel industry, supplying chargers for cars is an opportunity. They don’t need to be fast-chargers (we spend the night to charge). And a simple flat fee to charge will be welcome by car owners. The shift is happening, the hotels with the most chargers as attributes will attract that customer base.
TRANSFORMING MOBILITY EUROPEAN STARTUPS
Understanding Attribute Selling
Following electric chargers as a sellable attribute, here’s a good primer in attribute based selling. The introduction of attribute-based selling (ABS) in hotel distribution allows customers to select specific room/hotel features rather than just a hotel category. The move towards ABS could help move from to customer-centric distribution over process-centric practices. Enabling customization and personalization, which can significantly enhance the guest experience. But it is still quite a distant feature. Most PMS and distribution systems can’t deal with all that. And offering hundred choices to guests is not going to help either. But AI systems could… Here’s a great overview on how it works and what it could bring the industry (including electric chargers).
ATTRIBUTE-BASED SELLING
More Channels to Manage
TikTok has become a tool for travel planning, with algorithms suggesting places to visit, which travelers then mark on Google Maps to optimize information search and itinerary organization. This trend reflects the impact of social platforms on consumer behavior and presents an opportunity for hotels to leverage these platforms for marketing and engagement. The job of marketing used to be primarily coming up with excellent ideas that generate sales. Now the equally important job is how to tailor those ideas to the multitude of channels. And doing it so it fits each channel without going off-brand. Replicating the image for all channels isn’t really enough anymore.
TRAVEL PLANNING TIKTOK
AI in Hospitality, where and how?
We’re in an industry that needs people. We have rooms to prepare, guests to welcome, food to make and a feeling of friendliness to create. It isn’t easy to do with AI and tech solutions. Some things will come, but robots aren’t yet really good at changing bedsheets, cleaning bathrooms and managing all the random things in hotels. Still we can’t ignore that AI is coming and there’s got to be ways for us to use it in hospitality. Of course in marketing, personalization that’s a given. Every front desk person should have AI enriched guest profiles in front of them that can help welcome the guest. Recognizing the guest is half the work of personalization. Many people at front desk struggle with that, AI and computers don’t (you know, privacy and all that). Here’s a simple use case that would make hotel stays much better. But these articles have more.
AI HOSPITALITY, 3 HOTEL AI EXAMPLES
AI videos generated from hotel photos
As mentioned above. In the practical world, I have still to see some really well applied idea outside of marketing. But this one (and it is marketing related) is quite brilliant. Using Luma AI’s DreamMachine Influence Society created a flyover video of a hotel, from a still image. A quick way to generate b-roll for a hotel video or social media story that doesn’t break the bank. If nothing else, this is quite impressive.
AI VIDEO FROM HOTEL PHOTO
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
Hotels and their brands
The hotel industry isn't very good at building brands. Like seriously. It seems that the whole point of building a brand was lost in this industry. No, building a brand isn't done by a graphic designer or a fancy agency.
Creating brands is not hard, we can ask ChatGPT+Midjourney to do that. Building a brand on the other hand is whole different story. Ask consumer goods companies what it takes to create a new brand: on average 5 years of constant brand investment - and that's just to get off the ground.
In the hotel industry we're good at inventing brands. But we're really not great at building brands. It's not that the names of the brands are the problem (well, there are many exceptions to that sentence) - it is that the execution of the brand building, story telling, standards, experiences etc are done quite poorly, if at all.
The oversimplified formula to building a brand is:
Create a clear narrative that takes into account market positioning and identity.
Constantly repeat the brand with that exact narrative, again, and again, and again ad infinitum.
That's essentially it. The cool name, fancy logo, expensive color consultancy etc are nice to haves. Things like trademark research and SEO research help accelerate point 2 above, but with enough money you can survive without them.
If you need an analogy of what branding is, it is like inventing a word and then writing the definition. And as people use the word with the definition you wrote, you get a brand. Most great consumer brands today, were not good brands when they were created. Apple, Google, Amazon, Nike etc became good brands by execution, not because they had a fancy logo or cool sounding name. [Note: They all had bland, hard to trademark, non-memorable, and even hard to pronounce names when they started, without exception.]
Yes, hotels are at a huge disadvantage compared to consumer goods companies: it is hard to maintain standards in hotels built decades ago hence harder to repeat.
But then maybe the purpose of a hotel brand is different?
The two best executed brands in the industry are Marriott and Hilton. And it was mostly based on signage repetition. Nobody stays in an Accor or an IHG or a Louvre Hotel, they're not consumer facing brands.
P&G has 65 brands, and an organization of 103,000 employees mostly focused on marketing and distribution (repetition). Marriott has 31 brands and 121,000 employees mostly focused on servicing guests.
So are hotel brands mostly investment vehicles? It could explain the cavalier approach the industry has in building brands.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? JOIN THE CONVERSATION
