Ms. Knutson

Sales & Marketing

Dog-Gone Good Hotel Marketing

By Bonnie Knutson, Professor, The School of Hospitality Business/MSU

Don’t you love how every industry has its own language? Buzzwords that insiders use to make what they do sound as though it is something new and mysterious. Computer gurus talk about RAMs, WANs, and gigabytes. Financial experts tout SmallCaps, IPOs, and Leaps. Hoteliers banter back and forth about rack rates, REVPAR, and room blocks. And marketing folks? Well, we toss about AIDA, Positioning, and TOMA as part of our secret lingo. And, of course, one of the hottest buzzwords in the marketing dictionary is Branding.

Branding. It’s a term that carries an image for the guest and means equity for the hotel. Yet not too many of us really understand how this thing called branding works. Branding isn’t new and it certainly isn’t mysterious. In fact, it dates back more than a hundred years to when Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his research into branding. What, you say? Pavlov? Wasn’t he the guy with the dog and the bell?

Exactly. Day after day, Ivan Pavlov would ring a bell and, at the same time, he would rub meat paste onto the tongue of a dog. In time, the dog came to associate the taste of the meat with the sound of the bell so that it would salivate every time it heard the bell – even without tasting the meat paste. In other words, salivation became the dog’s conditioned response. In psychological terms, this is implanting an associative memory. In marketing terms. It is branding.

Branding, then, is simply the implantation of an associative memory in combination with a recall cue. Now that we know what it is, the next question – and really the important one to your bottom line – is, how do we do it?

Successful branding requires three essentials. The first is consistency. Pavlov would never ring the bell without giving the dog food and he would never give the dog food without ringing the bell. The two elements became the ham and eggs, the ‘burger and fries, the ying and yang of the association. You couldn’t have one without the other; they went together. It is the same in marketing. The message your hotel sends out has to be consistent. One of the easiest ways to do this is to build your ad campaign around a theme that can be used across media. Look at the success of the Taco Bell Chihuahua. That little dog helped establish the Taco Bell brand as a fun, causal, inexpensive place for Mexican food. The AFLAC duck, the Nike swoosh, and long porch of the Grand Hotel on Mackinaw Island, Michigan are likewise winners.

The second key is frequency. Day after day, and week after week, Pavlov would ring the bell and rub the meat paste on the dog’s tongue until the dog formed the associative memory. To establish your hotel brand in the consumers’ minds, you have to do the same thing. Creatively repeating your message has become even more important in this digital over-saturated communicated business environment. Consumers are hit with thousands of brand impressions each day, from TV commercials to brand logos on clothing. You have to break through that clutter to be heard and seen. While there is a host of other creative aspects that go into making a message memorable, without frequency, you have little chance of firmly establishing your hotel’s brand.

The third branding essential is anchoring. It is also the trickiest and most difficult to achieve because each potential guest sees and hears your message through his/her personal filters. Remember, perception is reality. Psychology tells us that when an associative memory is being formed, the new and unknown part has to be associated with a memory that is already anchored in the mind. For Pavlov’s dog, the unknown was the bell and the known was the taste of the meat. While consistency and frequency create branding, it is the connection to an emotional anchor that effectively glues it in the potential guest’s memory. This brings up the tricky part – connecting to an emotional anchor that is positive. If the dog didn’t like the taste of the meat, all the bell would have done is made it mad. But the dog liked to eat meat, so the bell triggered a positive response. Your branding challenge is to find that emotional anchor in your guest and prospective guests’ minds that will generate a positive feeling about your hotel.

A few years ago, I was conducting focus groups about meeting sites with meeting planners. We were talking about the advantages and disadvantages of various hotel properties, when one participant popped up: “That place? It’s like oatmeal, bland and unappetizing unless you add brown sugar and raisins.” If you’re like the rest of those meeting planners, you immediately associated that hotel with plain, colorless, basic, and not very appealing. Would you want to hold your event there? What if the participant has said, “That place? It’s like manna from heaven!” No matter what your personal image of heaven might be, you would immediately associate that hotel with a positive feeling. The bottom line is this: If you consistently and frequently cause people to associate your hotel with manna from heaven rather than with an oatmeal image, you are implanting a positive associative memory into their minds. And that is successful branding.

In reality, then, your guests and potential guests are your dogs. (No, I didn’t say are dogs, I said they are your dogs.) If you want a specific response from them, you have to tie your hotel’s identity to an emotional anchor that is already known to obtain the desired response. If you make such as association consistently and frequently, you will establish your brand. But as the Wizard of Ads, Roy Williams, points out, don’t expect too much too soon. It takes a lot of repetition to train the dog to salivate at the sound of your hotel’s brand name. Having the patience of Pavlov is well worth it.

Your REVPAR will thank you

Bonnie J. Knutson is a professor in The School of Hospitality Business in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. She is an authority on emerging lifestyle trends and innovative marketing. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and on PBS and CNN. She has had numerous articles in industry, business, and academic publications. Bonnie is a frequent speaker for executive education as well as business and industry meetings, workshops, and seminars. Dr. Knutson is also editor of the Journal of Hospitality & Leisure Marketing. Ms. Knutson can be contacted at 517-353-9211 or drbonnie@msu.edu Extended Bio...

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