In today’s connected Intenet era, how do you build a brand?
Christine Petersen, CMO of TripAdvisor, credited the Beatles as the role model for the TripAdvisor strategy. According to Christine, first they understood their audience, and second they were wildly creative.
Framed around four tips toward brand building, Christine painted a vision that is resolutely NOT about just building Website traffic, but pushing TripAdvisor content/product/brand out to the far reaches of the Web, social networks, and proprietary partner channels. Of course, all these efforts eventually lead to brand awareness and monetizable site traffic.
TripAdvisor is the 800 lb gorilla of travel content
Well, she didn’t use those terms, but provided some numerical stats that highlight TripAdvisor’s dominance leadership:
- 10 mm+ registered members
- 23 mm reviews and opiinons
- 18 new posts every minute
- 25mm visotors/month
- 1 mm destinations, hotesl, attractions, and restaurants
Here are four tips and many TripAdvisor case studies to help you effectively build brand, audience, traffic, and customers:
TIP 1: Find ways to delivery more value to the consumer
In difficult times, you need to ask yourself: what else can you do? Can you compete for another slice of the pie? What are you currently doing well and how can it be morphed to provide more value?
Case Study: Flight Metasearch and Fees Estimator
In 2008, airlines were adding more and more complicated and sometimes hidden fees. The result is that an old consumer need reasserted itself strongly: the need to determine “what the bottom line” was for airfares. TripAdvisor decided to tackle this issue because people were already coming to TripAdvisor media group sites to shop flights. As a result, they launched a flight metasearch product and added a fees estimator feature that serves as a “wizard” to calculated estimated baggage, inflight services, food, and drinks costs as part of a total cost of the flight.
The lesson I took away is to look for this incipient demand from your existing customers. Customers were sending a clear signal that TripAdvisor had the “permission” to extend their services into flights. The Fees Estimator became a nice “hero” feature to garner press/analyst attention and reinforce the “Get the Truth then Go” consumer advocacy attributes of the brand.
Case Study: Top Values Index
TripAdvisor also took their existing overall ratings and hotel star class and re-merchandised it in a different way. Via something called the Top Values Index, TripAdvisor highlights hotels that are best price for any given combination of hotel class and overall rating. According to Christine, consumers using top values index are seeing 31% savings vs. comparable properties.
I think this example shows that addressing market needs can be highly evolutionary and simply reoptimizing your existing product for shifting consumer preferences, which at this time is focused on value.
Case Study: Vacation Rentals vs. Hotels.
Based on TripAdvisor’s internal research, at least 50% of visitors are considering vacation rentals. This drove their decision to make a majority investment in Flipkey, a site that enables them to provide user reviews, photos, videos, including a vacation rental calculator.
TIP 2 Forming Partnerships
Success doesn’t mean going it alone. The online environment can turn “strange bedfellows into good partners.” (As a licensee of TripAdvisor’s content, we sure hope that’s the case with UpTake and TripAdvisor!)
Case Study: Syndication
Christine also highlighted the transition from being solely a destination site, to a content provider that seeks to syndicate and re-merchandise their core content assets broadly across media, channels, and partners. While she didn’t talk specifically about their licensing and syndication model, she did say that there are 24 different ways they partner with businesses to syndicate their content. According to TripAdvisor, 87% are people looking for hotels want reviews, and with one UK provider, reviews resulted in 2X conversation rate on their site.
Case Study: TripAdvisor Owner program
TripAdvisor also has a program where travel providers can register as a member and utilize TripAdvisor as an online marketing program.
TIP 3 Using social media
Christine strongly emphasized to the trade the importance of social media. Henry Harteveldt earlier called social media “Email 2.0″ and perhaps that is the best way to convince skeptical marketing executives that they must have a social media strategy. She quoted an Epsilon-Roper poll that 56% of CMOs are not interested in social media and many marketing execs are tired of hearing the term. But with 200 mm Facebook users today and 900% growth in Twitter, its dangerous to ignore the potential of social media for getting traffic, audience, and customers.
Christine highlighted several success stories. Frankly, I would have hoped that she would have shared some failures too, as I think it is highly unpredictable which apps go viral and which will fail in the Facebook environment. Some of the succesful apps included:
- Cities I Visited Facebook App. They launched a Cities I visited app that was widely adopted on Facebook but not adopted on the TripAdvisor site itself.
- Local Picks Facebook App was vital to growing restaurant reviews. Before the Facebook App, there were only 100k restuarants on TripAdvisor and these received a “paltry” number of reviews. But with the Facebook App in place, in 4 months TripAdvisor got more restaurant reviews than the previous 4 years! Today, they have 2.5 mm ratings and reviews on 500k restaurants.
- Cause Marketing Campaign App. TripAdvisor launched a /causes campaign which allowed the community to help decide which non profits would receive $1 MM. They received 1 MM votes,with a large # of votes coming from Facebook.
Tip 4 – Go International
I may have missed the last point she made. I think it was to go international. TripAdvisor shared several case studies:
- Japan – entering the market via partnership with JAL
- German – needed to customize the travel process with a greater focus on on packages.
- China – Abandon the brand and adopt a new one: DaoDao, which means “to arrive”. The core work on this site is Boston, but with a China Beijing localization team.
I have a healthy skepticism toward any company trying to break into the China market with a global technology platform, based on what I know about the Ebay China debacle. But perhaps Ctrip and Qunar are less fierce competitors than AliBaba was for Ebay, so perhaps TripAdvisor has some time to pursue the model for a while before the strain between local Beijing team and Needham headquarters begins.
Summary
The speech provided a whirlwind through a number of TripAdvisor marketing programs that leverage the reach of the TripAdvisor’s brand. While many of these specific tactics cannot be utilized without the market dominance leadership that they have, there are some principles that she offered that are applicable to all businesses in this economic environment. I think these principles are:
- Focus on the consumer’s increasing need to see value in their purchase decisions.
- Examine all your customer touchpoints or “listening posts” for where your new initiatives should come. Let the customer give you the hints of where you need to go instead of creating a strategy in an abstract, planning vacuum.
- Delivering more value to the customer might just require some subtle shifts or restructuring of your core proposition. It doesn’t necessary mean a dramatic overhaul of you business.
- A variation on the old sales saying, “ABC: Always Be Closing” might become “Always Be Closing Partnerships” in this new connected Internet era. Look for partnerships in strange places, provide services that make it easy to integrate, and find ways to be complementary as much as possible.
- Social media is here to stay. Its not just for teenage girls anymore. Ignoring it will not go away.
- Social media is good for some things, and not for others. For example, it was great for generating restaurants reviews for TripAdvisor. It may not be good for delivering highly monetizable traffic as compared to TripAdvisor’s organic search traffic.
- International is also here to stay. Ignore China, India, Japan, and Europe to your peril. (Elliott: However, don’t underestimate how hard it is and don’t assume a global one-size-fits-all platform is going to work. In fact, assume it won’t.)
Thanks Christine!
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