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!

Travelcom Related Posts:

• Kevin Fliess, TravelMuse, Video Interview
• Gregg Brockway, TripIt, Video Interview
  
• Sam Shank, Dealbase, Video Interview
• Travelcom 2009 Keynote-”There’s No Room for Maybe”

The keynote at TravelCom by Henry Harteveldt addressed the reality of a significant shift in consumer confidence and behavior caused by the financial crisis.  Entitled “There’s No Room For Maybe” was a call to action for the travel industry to overcome uncertainty and help consumers make more confident decisions and spend money on travel.

But were we all fiddling while Rome burned?

Harteveldt says yes–the online travel industry has failed to address these problems in good times, and now must address them in bad times.  According to Forrester’s Technographics Travel Online Survey Q1 2009, only 1 in 3 say travel Websites do a good job of presenting choices and tradeoffs. (this is exactly the problem that we are trying to help address at UpTake).

Here are 6 insights I got from the keynote. (What insights did you get?)

1.  Consumers are more open to trade-offs today than they have before.

They are willing to accept inconveniences (e.g. flight connections, location) in order to save money.  They expect to get deals and to get value.

2.  Online leisure/unmanaged business travel is still expected to grow in the coming years, even as the total travel market stagnates in the next 2 years.

In 2008, online was $84 billion but is expected to grow to $88 billion in 2009.

3.  “New Frugality” is a new consumer preference that we must consider strongly.  People still care about quality but they are doing intense price-shopping and considering their purchases with greater degree of diligence.  Implications:  travel providers MUST provide much higher quality written and visual content. Harteveldt: Details will matter much more.”  This means more photos, more details on room types, more descriptions, and more information so that people can set aside their uncertainty and plunge into the purchase process.

4.  Harteveldt highlighted a framework they have established called the “Four Pillars” – Merchandising, Context, Engagement, and Value.  The big point Harteveldt made was that “cross-selling isn’t merchandising” and that for too long, the travel industry has been thinking of distribution as putting inventory into channels and NOT about merchandising.  He pulled examples from the JCrew Website to show how other online retailers do merchandising and how the travel industry can benefit by observing what is going on in other industries.

5.  Harteveldt talked about “Context” being more important than ever before.  At UpTake, we talk about “Themes” and “trip types”…in other words, “Context” means providing the right information and details for the consumer’s travel planning needs based on their trip type, their trip companions, and their trip intent.  Harteveldt stated that “Context” helps shift the decision away from a pure price-based decision, which is good for consumers and for the trade.

6.  Another trend is the incdrease of social computing, and Harteveldt reference the “social computing ladder” that segments people by their engagement level with social computing:  creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.  Joiners have increased from 27% year ago to 37% today, and he characterized social networks as “Email 2.0″, which means that travel providers MUST take these networks into account today.  Also, more and more travel-specific social computing has begun, which is an encouraging trend for the industry.

The chart shows growth in all segments, but especially in the Joiners segment.

Bottom line is that the travel industry must fix the travel planning process to help people make decisions more easily and confidently, otherwise they simply will not spend!  The downturn creates an opportunity for those who stay close to their customers and their needs to retain their best customers and survive in what is highly turbulent times for the industry.

Will the industry hear this call to action and respond?  What do you think?  Thanks Henry!

Travelcom Related Posts:

• Kevin Fliess, TravelMuse, Video Interview
• Gregg Brockway, TripIt, Video Interview
  
• Sam Shank, Dealbase, Video Interview
• Travelcom 2009: TripAdvisor, “Going Here, There & Everywhere“

Video created by Elliott Ng.
During the next few months, UpTake will be presenting short takes with travel industry leaders, influencers and innovators. Our first video interview is with Kevin Fliess, CEO of TravelMuse. Kevin’s background is well suited to launching an online travel sites:

“His work and family life have taken him all over the world: from Tahiti to India and Canada to Mexico; Amsterdam to Turkey and the northern California coast to South Carolina islands. Prior to starting TravelMuse, Kevin spent 15 years as a leader in various high tech companies, most recently as VP of product marketing and product management for emerging solutions at SAP. He’s also held strategic positions at Synopsys, Icarian and Siemens. A serial innovator, Kevin co-invented the first composite application at SAP and has one patent granted with seven applications on file.”

We hope you enjoy his positive take on where the opportunities exist for online travel in this turbulent economy:

Travelcom Related Posts:

• Gregg Brockway, TripIt, Video Interview
  
• Sam Shank, Dealbase, Video Interview
• Travelcom 2009: TripAdvisor, “Going Here, There & Everywhere“
• Travelcom Keynote-There’s No Room for Maybe

TravelCom ’09, the US Travel Association’s annual travel industry conference, will be held March 31-April 2 in Atlanta, GA. This year’s theme is Transform Your Business: How to Adapt and Prosper in the Travel Ecosystem.

Travelcom Atlanta 2009

The list of speakers is a star-studded who’s who list of CEOs and senior executives of the biggest brand names in the travel industry. Senior Executives speaking at Travelcom’09 include:

• Steve Hafner, CEO and Co-Founder, Kayak.com
• Christine Petersen, Chief Marketing Officer, TripAdvisor
• Hugh Crean, General Manager, Live Search Farecast, A Microsoft Company
• Rob Torres, Managing Director, Travel, Google, Inc
• Gregg Brockway, Chief Executive Officer, TripIt
• Kevin Krone, VP, Marketing, Sales and Distribution, Southwest Airlines
• Krista Pappas, Head of Business Development, Live Search Farecast, A Microsoft Company, and TravelCom’09 Co-Chair
• Angela Brav, Senior VP, Franchise Services and Operations Support, InterContinental Hotels Group
• Henry Harteveldt, Vice President and Principal Analyst-Airline/Travel Industry Research, Forrester Research, and TravelCom’09 Co-Chair
• Patrick Lafferty, Chief Marketing Officer, Travel Channel Media
• Michael Thomas, Chairman, Travel Ad Network, BookingWiz.com and Sprice
• Robert Sahadevan, Vice President–Mileage Plus, United Airlines

You can see the full list of speakers, panels and scheduled events at Travelcom’09 here.

Travelcom takes on an added significance this year, in view of the economic meltdown. Companies are heading down to Atlanta not just for the linkups, but also because expert speakers at Travelcom ’09 are actually expected to outline realistic solutions to the problems and pressures faced by almost every travel company.

It’s a tall order, but that’s why they have people like Google’s Rob Torres explaining how to keep the ball rolling short-term, while not losing sight of the big picture. Freeborders Inc. will share its expertise and experience on how to move beyond cost control and create business value with the use of IT outsourcing.

Other speakers like TripAdvisor’s Christine Peterson and TripIt’s Gregg Brockway will explain how to make best use of the enormous potential of new media and the latest innovations in online travel.

Other topics covered include the latest practices of loyalty programs, metasearch, ancillary revenue opportunities, mobile marketing and reaching travelers through new technologies.

The US Travel Association is probably one of the few organizations who can actually pull off such an all-encompassing travel industry conference. You won’t likely be seeing all these topics being discussed concurrently in the same place at the same again in 2009.

Not to mention the fact that it’ll be virtually impossible to corral all these industry heavyweights again for another conference. The fact that they’re all coming underlines the critical importance of Travelcom’09. So I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a part of the travel industry, then you want to be at the Omni Hotel at CNN Center in Atlanta, GA on March 31 2009.

Travelcom’09 – Atlanta, GA (March 31 to April 2, 2009)