What my near death experience taught me about Lifecycle Marketing
Somewhere in the foothills of the Andes West of Cusco, Peru, our caravan of mini-buses winded their way through serpentine dusty roads under a cloak of darkness. Our guides had gotten word that a protest by local municipal workers was planned for the next morning, which would have blocked access to our destination: the Inca trail.
“Finish your meals everyone — we’re moving now. We’ll setup camp inside the national park, before it opens” reassured our local guides. We seemed to be one step ahead, yet we had no way of knowing how assiduous the protesters had been while we were leisurely sipping our pisco sours.
We were making good time, and as we neared our destination, an air of optimism swept through the cabins of our dusty battle-scarred Toyotas. It appeared as though our clandestine gamble would pay off. That is, until we saw the first boulder.
The roadway was littered with a trail of Smart-car-sized rocks. We were stopped dead in our tracks and we knew this barrier was too organized to be random. At first, it was only the cascade of our red brake lights that lit up the sky. But, after a few minutes, a more distant flickering arose — the protesters were coming, and they were bearing torches.
*******************************************************************
As ominous as this event was, the Buying Journey and Customer Life Cycle events that I progressed through prior to booking my first adventure tour helped equip me for this moment. These tours are like any high consideration purchase, where consumers progress through a series of stages before they decide to purchase (as opposed to that impulse buy of the National Enquirer or KitKat bar in the checkout aisle). B2B and automotive marketers are acutely aware of this challenge, but customers in any industry can also follow this pattern, if the purchase is significant enough.
Consumer first organizations that have honed their marketing capabilities to detect and react to these stages are better positioned to acquire, engage and retain customers. These organizations eclipse their competition, not by using costly promotions or “the next hot channel”, but because of consumer obsessed personalization that delivers product education, useful comparison details and by squashing perceived barriers (such as safety concerns).
If you can help your customers to feel confident about their high consideration purchases, they are more likely to be less price sensitive, show higher levels of loyalty, and perhaps lower levels of panic when being approached by a torch wielding mob.
Day 87
When does the consumer begin their buying journey for their next trip? According to market research¹, US consumers start their destination selection process, on average, 87 days before their date of departure (timing is similar for other mature markets). Determining the rough destination takes 21 days.
Fatigued from this effort, the consumer takes a 6 day break, before spending the next 17 days choosing travel components such as tours, flights, hotels and add-ons. By the time the consumer has purchased everything and pre-selected their seats, it is now 64 days before departure.
With these averages in mind, travel marketers can begin to map out buying journeys, which may include stages such as those illustrated below:
During the awareness & interest, you are free to cast a wider net of potential trip options and styles. In the research, you should have some clues into which specific destinations or styles are of interest, vs. those that are non-applicable. When a consumer has viewed the same trip five times, this is a strong indication they are narrowing their focus. Likewise, when they begin to look into your specific pricing and policy details, they are showing strong buying intent signals. If you’ve been paying attention to the customer up until this point, you should be able to provide useful comparisons between their short listed options and help them commit to booking.
In my personal travel story, it was the Compare & Consider stage messages that I received that later helped me keep my cool during the harrowing encounter with the protesters. This later buying stage is a more appropriate time to reinforce the credibility of the travel brand, including their safety and security policies. It is these messages at the right time that helped me book with confidence and form positive associations with the brand.
As a customer centric marketer, your goal is to detect and react in a helpful way as consumers move along the buying journey. If you’re lucky, your organization has already invested in one of the marketing cloud solutions I reviewed in: Marie Kondo Guide for Sparking Marking Cloud Joy. Although these solutions offer powerful journey management capabilities out of the box, specific industries such as travel have an additional challenge — fragmentation.
Boy, that escalated quickly
The holy grail for online travel, as in other consumer sectors, is the ability to match options to consumers on a one-to-one basis, based on their habits²
Consider the insurance marketer. Their repertoire of products is often in the single digits: life, health, disability, property & casualty, and trip. The retail banking industry marketer? Again, there are only finite permutations of chequing and credit products possible.
By comparison, the travel marketer’s products are often only limited by the number of global destinations; what’s more, each trip has dozens of attributes such as duration, style, theme and price. The product complexity widely surpasses banking and insurance, even before considering flight departure airports, dates and times.
The result? Extreme fragmentation.
Consider an adventure travel company that offers small group travel worldwide. Even if we narrow the possible trips to those in a single region (say, Africa), the possible unique conversations about trips and activities can quickly escalate to the billions of unique conversations. This is true even for organizations with only a modest number of marketable customers (e.g. 250K-500K).
This complexity makes providing relevant content the most challenging during the middle stages of the buying journey: Narrowing & Intent. A marketer can help here by detecting and reacting to consumer engagement patterns, where they have shown interest in one or more specific activities, or destinations.
One ingredient of the solution to solving the fragmentation problem is narrow artificial intelligence tools. Yet, even the best offerings from the most recognizable brands can produce underwhelming results. If AI tools are not “aware” or integrated into the buying journey or the larger context of customer’s life cycle.
**********************************************************************
It wasn’t safe to remain in the vans, so we were instructed to muster in a nearby vacant service station. “What’s going on?” asked a fellow traveler. “Turn off your flashlights” our guides instructed, “we’re going to negotiate with them”. What word would our guides bring? Would they come back at all?
Socks vs. Safaris
It’s all about truly knowing our product and being able to make recommendations, because the offer online is overwhelming. If you picture a family of four who go on one major holiday a year, for two weeks in the summer, that is a big economic and emotional investment. You need good advice (Thomas Cook: Group Head External Comm.)³
Despite online booking being around for over 20 years, some 60% of travelers continue to choose booking with an agent in person, or by phone⁴. Despite the speed and convenience of online booking, the majority of consumers are more comfortable with a personal touch — especially when it comes to investing in their limited vacation time and budgets. In part, this can be attributed to a failure by marketers to scale the personal touch online.
Using AI to be as helpful as a live agent requires that relevant trips and activities are suggested in a manner that appears to be backed up by deep product knowledge and expertise. Yet, what happens if you ask your favourite anthropomorphous AI for help? Whether it be Einstein, Sensei, Watson or Alexa, relevance is not something you should necessarily expect out of the box.
Upon closer examination of Salesforce Einstein example, the language of the built-in recommendation scenarios suggests a focus on eCommerce and the retail sector:
Since purchasing vacations has neither the cost, volume or frequency of buying socks, these pre-canned retail scenarios are often non-applicable for travel industry and other non-retail marketers. Often, the resulting recommendations can be worse than no recommendations at all.
While it may be tempting to turn on these generic AI solutions in an effort to “check the box” and be able to claim your team has “done AI”, non-relevant communications can have a detrimental effect on customer engagement. For example, promoting a vacation destination that a customer has already booked or recently completed indirectly sends a message that you do not know them, and you do not recognize your existing relationship with them as individuals.
Wouldn’t you be disappointed if the travel company you spend thousands with each year doesn’t acknowledge or recognize where you have been?
To truly engage with customers and replicate the personal touch of the travel agent requires that AI powered recommendations are tightly integrated with the stages of the buying journey and the long-term lifecycle for each individual. This means going beyond basic scenarios such as “customers who bought X also bought Y”, as well as having the freedom and flexibility to implement marketing-critical constraints and fatigue rules to ensure relevance and continuity.
*******************************************************************
It was fifteen tense and unsettling minutes before a silhouette emerged towards the service station. It was our guides returning, and they appeared unscathed. “They have given us their terms” the guides revealed somberly.
“They’re demanding 160 sol, or about $50 USD”, they sighed. Many of my travel companions were backpackers and on a shoestring budget; for them, a $50 USD per head cost would represent a significant setback to their lean budgets. It seemed unfair that these protesters would likely walk away with thousands as the hum of deliberations spread through our group.
“What? No no no no…” I overheard one guide correcting. He went on to explain, “No, not 160 for each person. 160 sol for *all* of us”. While we were focused on the gloomy body language of our guides, we only needed to clarify the math of the terms. With the total cost now better understood (which, was suspiciously close to the cost of one bottle of rum at the local corner store), we were all content to hand over a couple dollars for clear passage.
The only catch was that the passage was for tourists only, no guides and no vans.
“I guess this is what the adventure travel company was warning us about” bemoaned one of my companions. I nodded in agreement as we threw tents and other camping equipment on our backs to hike the remaining kilometers to the park entrance.
Although the circumstances of my eventual arrival at the Inca Trail entrance weren’t what I expected, I was thankful for being on-boarded to the travel company with the right messages about safety, and the unusual costs for transit that are a routine part of travel in many parts of the world.
¹ Rheem, Carol, Empowering Inspiration: The future of Travel Search, PhoCusWright 2012
² Tungate, Mark. The Escape Industry: How Iconic and Innovative Brands Built the Travel Business, London ; New York: Kogan Page Limited. Pg. 159
³ Mathias Brandes, Group Head of Thomas Cook External Communications (Tungate pg. 25)
⁴ Kevin May, co-founder of Tnooz (Tungate, pg. 156)
