Qualitative marketing research can be a valuable tool for gaining an in-depth understanding of business travelers' behaviors and attitudes toward hotels. It is a means for investigating what influences business travelers' purchase decisions and why. Obviously, business travelers today have many hotel choices. In fact, in many instances, these choices are within walking distance of one another. So, why do some business travelers choose to stay at your hotel while others stay at the one across the street? How can you drive more traffic to your property? Understanding what motivates them can greatly influence your bottom line. Read on...

If you think your marketing efforts are finished when your guests walk through the front door, then you are leaving money on the table. Marketing initiatives that generated the guest booking are just the first part of the battle. Getting guests to spend money in your hotel throughout their stay is what drives incremental revenue and makes your marketing efforts a complete success. So how do you maximizing guests' expenditures? By using a touch-point marketing strategy. Touch points are opportunities for generating incremental revenue from hotel guests throughout their stay from the moment of arrival to departure. Touch-point marketing involves determining the message, identifying the areas of opportunity, developing a method of delivery and tracking the conversion rate. In a nutshell, you have to tell the guest what you want them to do, how you want them to do it, affirm that they have made the right decision and tell them thank you for their spending. In addition to driving incremental revenue, touch-point marketing is critical to building brand loyalty. Read on...

Marketing partnerships can provide multiple benefits. They can help stretch your marketing budget, expand your brand visibility, provide a low-risk test marketing opportunity, generate incremental dollars and create community goodwill, just to name a few. However these same marketing partnerships can explode and cost you unexpected time, money and brand credibility if they are not developed in a strategic manner. At m-k-t-g, we employ an eight-step approach to the development of strategic partnerships and marketing alliances to ensure that all parties involved receive a ROI that is favorable to both their brand image and bottom line. Read on...

This year, experts predict that business travel will rebound to pre-9/11 levels for the first time. The National Business Travelers Association says there will be 219 million domestic business trips in 2005, up from 210.5 million in 2003 and awfully close to the 220 million made in 2000. This is good news for travel aggregators and suppliers alike - great news, really. But how do travel marketing executives leverage this upswing in terms of online marketing? Well, luckily there is even more good news: There are still plenty of stones left unturned in the online marketing arena, especially in the search engine marketing space (which I must say is the darling of the online marketing world). Read on...

The outlook for the coming years show countries such as India, Brazil, China & Russia having the largest impact on the consumer market. China is the largest population in the world and recent statistics indicate that 1 out of every 6 people on earth are living in China. This will have a drastic effect on the travel industry and the luxury market. Analysts also forecast that China will be the world's most important luxury market by 2011. As more products become available to more people, the pressure increases to offer something truly special. Read on...

There is a common misconception in the marketplace of exactly how you define a target market. At the very least companies define their target market using specific demographic criteria such as age, income, location and professional title. Then, there are companies who add in some psychographic information such as hobbies, interests, travel habits and buying behavior. This information is all important...but it is only 25% of the definition of who is the ideal fit for your property. If you were to throw a dart at a dartboard, the demographic and psychographics of your target market would represent the outermost ring of the board. This means that if you are targeting all of your marketing and sales efforts using only demographic and psychographic information as your ideal market criteria, you will have a tough time hitting a bulls eye with any consistency. This translates into wasted time, money and resources marketing to the wrong people - a sure sign your property is out of alignment and you haven't correctly profiled your ideal customer. Here are telltale signs that your property is out of alignment: Read on...

No matter how and where you travel, with or without your products or your corporate image, the chances are that a lot of your marketing messages are getting lost in translation as they make their way around the globe. Business names are being hit the hardest as the world becomes smaller and companies go global. Each one of us is now spinning in a mix of international alphabet soup of strange names and terminologies. You invent something new, send out a release, the media talks about it and, within seconds, it becomes an international item.Your business name image might end up as a great universal message or emulate some strange and confusing messages with insults or profanity. But why? Read on...

Is this the dawning of the age of branding or just another black hole? Learn and teach new standards, lead and spread the new knowledge in your organization, break the old methods. The sooner you come out of the bondage of the old fashioned marketing and branding campaigns, the sooner you will see a new dawn. There is certainly light on the other side of this black hole. There are brand new rules of global marketing. A proper discovery process on how to approach visibility while building clean international name identities for this global name-economy is a must. Globalization will make the localization process manageable. Look out for feelings of certain numbness while sitting in a quiet time zone in a corporation. Read on...

For any Hospitality corporation with plans to hit the markets with an IPO in 2005 or beyond, here are some key points. Just like how your latest technology and your other corporate assets are essential to develop great financials for a potential IPO, your corporate image and brand name recognition are equally important to get the word out in the marketplace. Both are critical for real success. Google's recent success with their IPO and the way their unique name played out is a clear case of a smart victory. Uniqueness and distinction makes a clear path of communication starting from your HQ all the way to the shareholders via the stock markets. A corporate brand with millions of dollars in advertising and promotional support is just a useless brand unless it has a unique position, and a clear name identity, strong enough to place the corporation aside from all the other copycats and look-alike, similarly named companies. Read on...

There are thousands of very, very small companies out there who will develop a logo at no cost, a tagline at no cost, get you a free domain name and a free website at no cost. I guess the next big thing will be that they also write you a fat check...all for free. Who are these enterprises and how are they doing this? The Internet has removed the cumbersome overhead costs and linked very talented people to handle the real issues in real time without the fancy decorum and the super fulvous big time fanfare. Enter the street fighter, a savvy marketer with some teeth and a friendly smile. The freelance nations have far too many operators on the marketing and branding circuit that all are chipping away the armor of the giant branding companies who until now sold more on their posh addresses and furniture than raw talent. Million dollar logos with a matching spin to thousand of others, million dollar-slogans, confusing sentences as branding miracles. Suddenly, such services are now available for free as an incentive to get a new client for print and related packaging services. Read on...

In today's e-commerce age, where everyone is forced to type and to remember names with absolutely correct spellings, companies with big branding campaigns only hurt themselves with their old-fashioned, painted, colorful advice. They must all reconverge and regroup and realign their thinking to cope with today's name-driven economy. Contrary to branding beliefs, customers don't really care about, and are completely oblivious to, a corporation's image being tied to a very specific color. Meanwhile, trying to use a color for corporate identity can actually lead to trouble. For example, Orange Mobility, a British mobile phone company of France Telecom, is one of the largest telephone players in Europe. Just to make its point, as a gimmick, the company painted an entire town in England orange. Now, Orange Mobility, fully drenched in the color orange, is asking courts to disallow Easymobile, a new mobility service, the use of the color. Read on...

Corporate identity and image design rules of the past are gone and so are the principles of old-fashioned mass marketing blitzes. What is now new is to aim for the targeted areas with powerful, unique global name identities and apply the latest of cyber-branding skills. The laws of e-commerce and Internet marketing are just the right steps in the right direction. Every hour there are new changes to our old ways of thinking about traditional marketing rules. While we are all very deep into e-commerce, we must be aware of whether we are either already very successful or still learning the processes. Here are some cutting-edge rules to ensure good returns on e-commerce and Internet marketing. Read on...

In this day and age of ensuring your identity is recognized by consumers, the question will inevitably be raised; do you or do you not need a brand? Are there values and a return on the investments or can you make it on your own? With the availability of information at everyone's fingertips and a plethora of choices available for consumers to buy a product, how can anyone ensure that the bases have all been covered? The larger question of critical importance today, however, is the relationship of brand value. In reality, consumers value branded companies. A walk through any major shopping area will prove this. Brands deliver major impact to a business as they will most often bring loyal customers with previous positive experiences. For independent hoteliers, this can make a huge difference to being successful or not when competing in a market place. Read on...

The word "branding" is dangerously overused. Many people use branding as a cure for all kinds of problems in all kinds of businesses. To lay claim to a deeper understanding of this elementary word, branding agencies all over the world have developed some cute variations of it, from "emotional branding" to "primal," "sensory," "musical," "internal," "external," "holistic," "vertical," "abstract," "nervous" and all the way to "invisible" branding. However, to see these distinctions, you will need special 3D spectacles. The list of branding types is almost like the three MIT wizards who took an academic conference for a ride by submitting a paper in all fake jargon: "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Their paper was accepted. Read on...

Why are hotel loyalty programs important to consumers? What do travelers want from them? How do they affect consumers' decisions about where to stay? How do you attract target market consumers' attention to your program? Qualitative research, primarily through focus groups, can provide answers to these questions. Read on...