Making Hospitality Marketing Customer-centric
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, May 30, 2010
Most often hospitality industry talk a lot about customer service at the property as a key differentiator to customer experience & satisfaction.
I believe this is not the case and most often, it starts with even before the customer visits the hotel or the restaurant of choice. Also, there are many a times, the post usage experience is forgotten and very rarely have I ever seen any credible data-led customer marketing intiatives in this phase.
It was interesting to see Intercontinental Hotels do very interesting customer marketing work in this area. Here are some interesting facts:
- Intercontinental Hotel Group’s (IHG’s) uses of data-driven marketing to improve communications with existing customers and prospects is an interesting case study for many hotel groups across the world.
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Lincoln Barrett, vice president for guest marketing and alliances, shared that, for IHG, building a customer-centric marketing strategy is based on 3 Key pillars:
- Invest in technology
- Expand into new frontiers
- Build a centralized customer organization
She was talking at the UNICA Marketing Innovation Summit in Orlando.
- She talked about the need for real-time data mart that would allow IHG to match the data it was gathering through proprietary and third-party sources to existing customer information.
- According to her this step also made it possible to gain immediate access to data for analysis or campaign building purposes – a significant upgrade to IHG's previous functionality, which updated records in batches and only made data available some 30 days after a customer incident (like a hotel stay).
- She talked about some interesting trends in hospitality Marketing - Right Time marketing, Channel Synergy, Glocal Communication, Non-member marketing etc.