I have been reading a lot of marketing articles, blogs, white papers, and books lately. All in an effort to become better equiped to bring GuestSpan’s solutions to market and make the customer want to buy. We have conducted market research, spoken to hotel owners and travelers, attended trade shows and conferences, and pretty much talked to everybody we could to promote our concept and gauge market reaction.
It has occurred to me in all of this that all of the time and effort we put into cleaver marketing schemes and research is really an effort to get back to the days of the country general store. We’ve all seen them in movies. And some of us have even lived in small towns that still have something like them. In early America the general store was the hub of economic activity in small towns. Everything happened around the store- mail was delivered there, telegrams were sent and recieved, and every good imaginable from animals to household cleaners were sold there. But the centerpiece of the general store was the shopkeeper.
The shopkeeper knew everyone in town, knew what they bought and sold, knew who the sent mail to and recieved mail from, knew where they lived and what they did for a living-He knew pretty much everything. It wasn’t this knowledge, though, that made the shopkeeper so good at what he did. He really knew his customers. He lived with them. He knew, for instance, that Mrs. Jones hosted a party every Thursday and liked to serve carrot cake. So he made sure that he had it in stock and fresh for her when she came into the store. He also knew that the Smith children didn’t care for licorice, but liked horehound. So when Mr. Smith came in for the groceries there was always a package of horehound sent home with it. It was these little personal touches that made the shopkeeper indispensible.
Modern technology and the supermarket essentially did in the little shopkeeper, and ever since then businesses have been trying to get as close to their customers as he was. Technology has come a long way in helping business accomplish this, but there is still a great deal of distance between the business and it’s customers. I think that when we truly start to understand our customers one an intimate level, for instance, knowing which hotel guests like to order extra pillows, and which restaurants the most frequently visit when they stay at our hotel that we will truly be closer to the kind of relationship the shopkeeper had with his customers.
This is something GuestSpan is striving to deliver to the hospitality industry. I don’t know what the end game looks like at this point. But bringing guests, hotels, and the surrounding community closer together makes things better for everybody.
How many different services and advertising channels can you pack into one television? HITEC in Austin provided us with dozens of vendors that seek to make money through televisions installed in hotel rooms.
And, most of it is just garbage. At least, that’s what the Marriott hoteliers are telling us.
These vendors are trying to feed advertising, hotel information and paid content through the primary entertainment device. For the most part, their value proposition is poor. The television can’t carry all of those businesses. Unfortunately, it is an easy target for expanded services simply because it already exists in every room and tapping into an unused channel is too tempting for vendors.
The problem with TV content providers is that people aren’t looking for information there. When a business traveler turns on the TV, they are heading toward a specific channel or program. So what if Lodgenet is the default channel to pop up? They are one remote control click away from being invisible and irrelevant. Usage and linger rates show that Lodgenet appeals to a very, very small subset of travelers overall. Some people check their bill on the TV. Others order the occasional movie. But, about 98% of hotel guests flip right past those information channels and never return.
These vendors suffer from the same problem that all of those sponsor-driven internet access sites experience; the kind that immediately take the user to the sponsor’s screen upon logging in. When I head to the internet, I’m likely headed there for a purpose (check email, sports, maps, etc…). When the sponsor screen pops up, I don’t even see it. I’m headed toward my destination and that sponsor screen isn’t even a speed bump along the way. When I turn on my laptop, I’ have a purpose and that’s where I’m going.
Same thing with Lodgenet and the other hotel service guides that feed through the television. When I turn on the TV in the hotel room, even if I don’t know the specific channel to watch, I know I’m looking for entertainment and channels that sell me stuff are rarely entertaining.
The best chance I saw at HITEC was a couple of companies that provide scrolling television programming guides. They have timed the guides to take a while and the most appealing stations are always at the end of the list. While the guide scrolls, advertisements are shown. Because they provide useful information, they have the highest likelihood of attracting eyeballs for a few minutes each day. (For an entertaining conversation, call HotelGuide and ask them how they feel about the fact that EGSTV guys broke off and formed a competing service. Three words: “Bitter Cat Fights.”)
In the next couple of posts, I’ll give my thoughts on the proper place for providing information and putting advertising in front of hotel guests.
In the meantime, happy traveling.
