Ms. Knutson

Sales & Marketing

Creative Marketing Doesn’t Have to be Expen$ive

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

Once upon a time, there were three jewelry stores that stood next to each other. Each had identical front doors, windows, and brick facades. The owners, Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. Z all carried comparable merchandise and targeted the same customers. In short, there wasn’t much to differentiate one from another.

One day, Mr. X, who owned the store on the far left, hung a large banner across his store front. It boldly read, “Big Sale”. The banner had the desired effect and soon Mr. X had more customers and was selling more jewelry than either of his competitors.

Seeing the success of his neighbor, Mr. Y, who owned the store on the far right, decided that he needed to promote his wares too. Not to be outdone, he hoisted a banner across his store front that read, “Biggest Sale Ever.” Again, the sign produced the hoped for results and Mr. Y soon enjoyed more sales than his two opponents.

Poor Mr. Z. Sandwiched between “Big Sale” and “Biggest Sale Ever,” he was attracting fewer cust omers, experiencing dwindling sales, resulting in shrinking profits. He was in trouble. But what to do? How to get customers in the door? Being a small, independent business, Mr. Z didn’t have a big advertising budget. He couldn’t afford a catchy radio jingle, a big newspaper ad, let alone a slick TV commercial.
A few days later…

Hung high on the façade of his jewelry store, between the “Big Sale” and “Biggest Sale Ever” banners of his competition, Mr. Z placed a sign which merely said, “Main Entrance,” with an arrow pointing downward to his front door.

Moral of the story: It doesn’t take a lot of dollar$ to be creative.

Very few of us in the lodging business can go head to head with the marketing power of the big name hotels. And even if we do fly the flag of a global brand, the old axiom that all business is local still applies. But what we might lack in dollar$, we can make up for in the might of our imaginations.

Consider AsiaGraphics, a small print service located in the atrium area of a large Shanghai, China hotel. It printed a simple half-page flyer and slipped it under the doors of the 350 attendees of an international business meeting. The message? Run out of copies? Need extra name cards today? Relax. Come to… Cost? Minimal. Effect? Well, I know of at least 30 people who had AsiaGraphics print additional copies of materials or additional business cards with their Chinese translations on the back. In other words, this little print service used a creative message to show it was the easy solution to a big far-away-from-home problem. And it worked.

Consider the manager of a hotel’s restaurant who spends 35 cents a day in her creative marketing campaign. Each day, on her way into work, she goes through a toll gate when she exits the interstate near her property. Knowing that most people who take that exit work in the area, she hands the gate attendant the 35 cents for her fee and another 35 cents for the car in back of her. She then asks the attendant to give her business card to the following car and say that the toll has been paid by the driver ahead. Within the first month, she had seven new guests come into the hotel’s restaurant, in the second month, nine, and…to borrow from journalist Linda Ellerby…so the story goes.

Consider the owner of a hotel who creatively markets to the moms and dads watching their children play soccer in the field across from the property. Every Saturday morning in the fall, he makes a big pot of coffee, then he and a helper walk over, cups and complimentary coffee in hand, to a group of about 40 grateful parents. Where do you think these people go when they need a room night, want to book meeting space, or celebrate a family event?

Finally, consider the owner of a small travel agency who reaped six figures from a creative $75 marketing effort. Back on that Saturday in 1988 (yes, I know it was a long time ago, but the principle still applies) when Michigan State University was on the verge of wrapping up a trip to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, the young owner placed a small ad in the sports section of the local newspaper. The ad stated that “when MSU wins today, we will be open to take your reservations to the game.” Before the day was over, she had booked 170 air/hotel/game packages, and by the end of the weekend, she had more than 300 customers booked for the trip to cheer the Green and White in California. At that time, the average booking was $815 and, at that time, travel agents made a straight 10%. That’s not a bad ROI on a $35 ad. To round out this story, many of the first-time customers stayed on to become regular clients.

You get the point. It doesn’t take a lot of dollar$ to develop and implement a successful marketing program. What it takes is creativity and belief in that creativity. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood most of us bury our creative powers deep in our business minds. We forget how to be like Tom Hanks in the movie Big. We forget to look for opportunities by seeing the world from a top-of-the-desk perspective as Robin Williams did in the Hollywood classic, Dead Poets’ Society. And we forget to take creative risks like Dudley Moore did in the film, Crazy People. It is often said that we enter kindergarten as a question mark and exit college as a period. In this increasingly competitive and over communicated global lodging business, we have to become a question mark again.

Tomorrow’s lodging winners will be creative thinkers, not necessarily big dollar spenders. It doesn’t matter whether we get our creative juices going in the shower, while jogging, or while playing couch potato in front of the TV. What does matter is that we dig up our creative talents, trust them, and soon, like Mr. Z, we will be attracting more guests into our “Main Entrance.”

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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