Hoteliers - You May Be Spending Too Much Of Your Precious Marketing Budget On Unmeasureable Channels! Ten years ago, I got to know the owner of a local car wash, and I remember him saying, “one thing great about the car wash business… the internet cannot provide car washes!” Of course, he was right, but what he did not anticipate was competition and how the internet would provide at one’s finger tips the location of all his competitors and their pricing. This would in turn change his margins and profits. And it did. This is not new news to you as a hotelier. The hotel and tourism business is experiencing change just like many industries thanks to the internet. The internet is providing buyers with information in lightning speed and in a depth never imagined. What may be viewed as great opportunity may also feel like a curse. For airlines, hotels, golf tee times, and other similar businesses it seemed like a godsend when the ability to sell off unused inventory was instantly provided. The variable cost was minimum to the revenue gain. Or at least that is what everyone felt was the gain. But low and behold, now years of training consumers [...]

Another great post from our friends at McKinsey. We see the challenge of getting the CEO to embrace marketing measurement and analytics as an ongoing struggle within many of our clients and peer organizations. This article provides wonderful recommendations for senior marketers struggling with the same challenges within their companies. Good advice from one of the industry's thought leaders.   http://bit.ly/2sdG6b2  

I was speaking at a conference recently and attending another session during the day. I heard a fantastic quote and then received further confirmation from the MarTech conference in San Francisco this week. The quote was "If you're buying technology to solve your marketing problems, then you don't understand the technology and probably don't understand your problems".  Confirmation comes in the form of the newest MarTech 5000. Need I say more??marketing_technology_landscape_2017

You've read our posts on the impact of disruption, so here's a great article by Jacques Bughin from McKinsey regarding the impact of digital disruption. McKinsey on Digital Disruption  

Southeast Tourism Keynote

McKinsey Analytics March 2017 Companies can put their information to work by teasing out novel patterns, driving productivity, and creating new solutions. Capturing-value-from-your-customer-data

RMG Revenue FasTrack is the addition to your already built house. By RMG Founder Stuart Holt Imagine a public company executive meeting with the CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, EVP of Sales, and the CMO. The meeting begins with the CEO stating the obvious, “As you all know, our shareholders don’t buy our current price, they are buying our future price”! The CEO continues, “our stock has declined a bit but not as bad as others, but we still need to figure out how to grow our revenue, watch our expenses, and maintain our excellent reputation for a top-notch product and service”. Therefore, “let’s spend this time discussing how to grow our revenue”. We are confident many of you reading this have been in this type meeting. The CFO pipes in and says, “we can’t save our way to profitability. This past year we have done an incredible job of lowering our expenses and we also had a substantial layoff. There is always room for improvement, but I think this past year was the year of cutting and little is left to do”. The COO says, “we have been able to maintain solid product and service quality despite all [...]

Much more than just a buzzword, disruptive marketing is changing the way we react to, understand and accept companies and their advertising. From a business standpoint, disruptive marketing represents a key shift in an era where promotional strategies update as fast as the technology that carries them. Apple didn’t change music—it changed the way consumers shop for music with a disruptive service that revolutionized the industry. Netflix has revolutionized media consumption. Tesla has disrupted the auto industry by creating direct-to-consumer purchasing pipelines that break from the traditional dealership model and give consumers a way to interact with a car brand that’s familiar to their experiences in other categories. When you look at Airbnb — and also Uber, for that matter — it’s clear that many of today’s disruptors are focusing on the social aspect of consumerism. There’s something more attractive to today’s customer about purchasing a product or service from a person as opposed to a large corporate brand. Airbnb accomplishes this by connecting people to people. This peer-sharing aspect is what’s allowed the company to grow so quickly. Whereas disruption turns an industry on its head by offering customers something that previously didn’t exist, innovation merely makes an existing value offering better, [...]

We at RMG saw this recent posting from our friends at The Financial Brand. The article, by Ron Shevlin, summed up our approach and belief succinctly and we felt it important to share.   During a presentation at strategic planning session for a large credit union, I challenged the management team’s notion that the FI was–or could be–“competing on superior service.” My argument went as follows: The market isn’t big enough. Only so many consumers choose a financial provider for its “superior service capabilities.”  Many consumers choose an FI based on convenience–not service–related factors. Even there, “convenience” is not a single or well-defined concept, as convenience could mean nearby branches, or extended hours (like it means to one bank here in the Northeast), or it could mean the provision of technology-based tools to make the consumer’s financial life easier to manage. The strategy isn’t measurable. Managers need to be able to gauge two things: 1) To what extent is their chosen strategy a smart strategy, and 2) How well are they executing on their chosen strategy. There’s no shortage of financial institutions (especially credit unions) who claim to provide superior customer care — with no ability to measure or prove that [...]