Mr. Martin

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Achieving Brand Loyalty: Bringing Community to Your Web Site

By Maurice Martin, President, COO & Founder, iRise Inc.

In the old days of the Internet (10 years ago), the first generation of hotel Web sites were a passive medium for presenting a colorful hotel brochure, hence were dubbed brochureware. Those Web sites were one-dimensional and provided your brand a destination on the World Wide Web -- but there was nothing meaningful your potential guests or existing customers could do there. They couldn't make, cancel or confirm reservations.

The second generation of hotel Web sites, now commonplace on the Web, was all about being able to conduct commerce online: searching a directory of hotels and making reservations, as well as extending, canceling and confirming reservations. These Web sites provided a full-blooded reservation system without a warm-blooded mammal to help with the process.

Now arrives the newest generation of hotel Web sites: interactive spaces that stand to replace paid advertising and public relations as the strongest means for hotels to drive brand loyalty and competitive differentiation.

Built upon Web 2.0 technology, this newly evolved Web site offers customized searches and posted guest reviews, and it might be the best way to make your hotel brand stand out as the hotel industry continues its current upward trend of growth and expansion.

Increase Brand Loyalty

In basic terms, Web 2.0 technology is the business revolution of harnessing the Internet to create an ongoing, multi-dimensional dialogue between companies and their customers.

The Web 2.0 generation of hotel Web sites is not just about making reservations online -- users can find hotel sites close to their interests and connect their hotel experience to those. For example, these prescient Web sites first determine if a customer's trip is for vacation or business. For a business trip, it asks if they have business travel needs such as shuttle services, proximity to an airport and up-market restaurants appropriate for conducting business. For vacations, the Web site helps the customer find activities nearby that are fun for children, child-friendly restaurants, and hotels with proximity to theaters, golf courses, etc.

The most enticing and potent aspect of these new hotel Web sites is the ability for prospective hotel guests to search for travelers' reviews and comments about their experiences at each hotel location.

Posting guest reviews, also known as consumer-generated content, has taken center stage as hotel marketing executives realize that creating a word-of-mouth community around their Web site is the best way to drive brand loyalty and define their competitive differentiation. In fact, this medium of guest reviews is more powerful than any advertising or public relations campaign: What could be a more credible endorsement than a family or a business traveler with the exact needs and tastes as yours, who just checked out of a particular hotel?

Marketers have known for decades that people make their purchasing decisions based on peer reviews. What's new about these Web 2.0 sites is that the Internet has enabled marketers to wield peer reviews to their advantage. ToysRUs.com, Netflix, Amazon and eBay are perfect examples in that each product page features endless reviews where other people describe their experiences with and opinions of toys, books, music, movies, etc.

The same principle applies to hotel reviews: When customers see a hotel property rated as a 4- or 5-star hotel, they most often will trust a recently penned peer review describing the property favorably than that given out by a guidebook or the hotel's own rating.

The sheer economics of the hotel industry today is perhaps your best reason to join the new evolution of hotel Web sites. As hotel occupancies and rising room rates continue to fuel the most aggressive hotel-building boom in a decade, hotels are grasping for new ways to spotlight their brands. Amid this industry boom comes a proliferation of new boutique hotels, as well as less expensive, upscale brand hotels, small, limited-service hotels, and new hotel brands created to attract young, hip guests. What this spells for today's hotel executive is an urgent need to find new ways to stand out in the crowded market.

Creating a sense of community and loyalty around a brand is the holy grail of consumer marketing. And what better way to build brand loyalty than through the customers themselves?

Fear of Bad Reviews

The idea of asking people their opinion is not new. In fact, that's how people have been making informed decisions for centuries. Prior to the Internet, you could only get the opinions of people close to you. But with the Internet and the Web 2.0 community capabilities of peer reviews, you can get the opinions of thousands of people, most of whom you have never met.

For some in the hotel industry, the idea of hotel guests posting reviews is a controversial subject: what do you do when you get a bad review? While some executives instinctively want to run in fear from such a review, the better response is to turn the review into an opportunity for brand improvement.

If someone posts a bad review, the hotel can respond by addressing the issue head-on that the issue has been fixed and improved. Likewise, another customer can post a response that highlights their very positive experience, thereby balancing out the feedback.

While some of you might not feel ready to embrace this dialogue on your Web sites today, take note: this is the future of hotel marketing on the Internet -- especially with the increasingly powerful Generation Y. This is a key target demographic that many of you are already catering to by opening hip new properties.

These raised-on-computers generation of hotel guests expect and take for granted the capabilities of customized searching and travelers' reviews. The more Internet-savvy your customers become, the more they will demand peer-based reviews of your properties. And if they can't find them on your Web sites, they'll find them on your competitors' sites - and that's where they will check in after first checking it out online.

How It Works

So now that you're convinced that your company is ready to join the Web 2.0 generation, how do you begin?

First, ask yourself: What is the value in developing and bringing to market your Web 2.0 Web site six months faster than your competitor?

Next, visualize with pictures the kind of Web site you want to create to serve your customers' needs. The best way to visualize a complex Web site is to first develop a robust simulation. Simulation is the process of building a dynamic, interactive prototype of a Web site instead of relying on the usual time-consuming, text-based document, spreadsheet, PowerPoint, or vague engineering specs. It's also the safest and most cost-effective approach to building a complex Web application.

From there, you can build the exact application that you, your customers and fellow executives want based on user testing. This is a fully interactive mockup of the Web site, and it removes all the ambiguity associated with a text-based approach. The simulation, which will look and feel like a real Web site, can be loaded with actual data so that your employees and customers can test-drive it and offer feedback before coding even starts.

Hundreds of companies have already built complex Web applications and saved millions of dollars in the process by bringing to market faster their Web portals and Web sites. Now it's your turn to bring your hotel brand into the 21st century as well.

Maurice Martin founded iRise on an early and accurate prediction of Java acceptance and Internet growth in 1996. In addition to his business management role, he shapes the iRise corporate vision, and guides the product strategy and roadmap. He gained his business and technology acumen during tenures at Deloitte Consulting and Accenture, working with clients such as Capital Group, Kaiser Permanente and Southern California Gas Company prior to founding iRise. Maurice earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mr. Martin can be contacted at 310-426-7886 or mmartin@irise.com Extended Bio...

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