Tribes! Who Are They And How Are you Nurturing Them?
August 2, 2010 at 5:57 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a CommentSeth Godin wrote a book called Tribes. These are groups of people with a common interst or bond with you. We all have our social tribes, our business tribes and our family tribes to name a few.
Espcially in business, our tribes look to us for certain things such as expertise and the services that we offer. The issue is that other companies and people offer the same services.
The point of differentiation is how we treat and lead our business tribes. Do we communicate with them on issues that are of interest other than business? Do we allow them them to get know us as people?
Email lists should be segmented by tribes. In other words, we have a tendency to push out to everyone who ever gave us an email address instead of realizing that each ‘tribe’ has different interests in our product or service.
There are past leisure guests, frequent corporate guests, group tribes by market segmetn, etc.
When was the last time you reached out to one of your tribes and give them something of interest that was not a sales request? If you establish yourself as an expert that gives your tribe information they can use, you are way ahead of the competition. They will remember you when the time comes to buy!
The next blog post will be the logical extrension of this one on Socia Media Tribes!
Are Hotel Rooms in Danger of Becoming a Commodity?
June 15, 2010 at 3:05 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: hotel blog, hotel industry, hotel revenue management, hotel sales
Does anyone remember when the legacy airlines, Delta, United, Continental, etc, began engaging in price wars? These were driven by mulitple bancruptcies, follwed by a recession and dictated by their own yield management systems. They then began dumping distressed seat inventories on the OTAs, both opaque and transparent.
Today there are virutally no points of differntiation bewteen them except routes and schedules and the cookies on Delta that no one is willing to pay extra for. In other words, airline seats on these carriers have basicly become a commodity, undifferentiated by fares or amenities whre they follow each to the bottom.
Interestingly enough, it is the discount airlines that now are clearly differentiated. Southwest with its no checked baggage fees and cattle call seating priroities, Frontier with its three tiered fare structure and don’t forget those cute tail animals as well as several others.
On the other end of the spectrum the luxury airlines, mostly overseas airlines like Singapore Air, Quantas, etc are differntiated by the level of service and amenities offered, albeit at a price.
Sound familiar? Could this be the reason that the luxury, independent and economy sectors are leading the hotel industry out of the recession? (STR, June 10, 2010)
Is it becuase these sements are differentiated by rates and amenities for the luxury and economy sectors, and by price pretty much for all three.
It is the mid market hotels, with or without Food and Beverage, that are still struggling. Most of these have pretty much the same amenities, Frequent Guest programs (most travelers belong to many) and are only differentiated by rates that become a diluted differentiator when so much inventory is ‘dumped’ on the OTAs.
It is the ‘race to the bottom’ that has exposed this threat but it isn’t too late!
Learn the lesson of the airlines and don’t follow the market in a race to the bottom. Now is the time to maximize the opportunities in the increasing demand that we are seeing!
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