Success in sales and marketing is about understanding people, and what defines people in the most meaningful way isn’t their demographics-their gender, age, income, and more. It’s their values.
NB: This is an article from Valuegraphics
For decades, demographic data has been the go-to metric for grouping and understanding target audiences in the hospitality industry. But relying on demographic data to identify similarities within cohorts is less accurate than you likely expect.
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Data shows that within a given cohort, individuals are on average only 10.5% similar to each other, which means marketing efforts targeting a particular demographic will miss the mark roughly 90% of the time. In practice, engagement rates on direct marketing campaigns tend to be even worse.
When we look at some of the prevailing challenges in the hospitality industry today-such as increasing brand consistency, competing in the age of online booking agencies, and adopting innovative new technologies-such a low success rate doesn’t cut it. The reason for such high failure rates is simple: we’ve been using the wrong filters to understand people.
Instead of continuing to define guests based on broad assumptions, shifting from demographics to a values-driven strategy can multiply your marketing effectiveness, deliver precisely what your guests want from their hotel experience, and solve some of your most pressing business problems.
Why Marketers Need to Know Their Customers’ Values
In marketing, values are one leg of what I call the three-legged stool of audience insights. Together, all three legs-values, demographics, and psychographics-provide a balanced, full understanding of your audience. Rely on only one leg, as many marketers have done with demographics, and you risk your marketing efforts collapsing beneath you.
For decades, marketers have mistakenly used demographics to describe who people are, but demographics only tell us what people are. You can think of demographics as the Dewey decimal system for the library of humanity; they can take you to the shelf you’re looking for, but all the books on that shelf are going to be different.
The second leg of the stool, psychographics, encompasses other customer data your organization collects: how many times a customer stayed in your hotels, how much they spent during their last visit, what activities they participated in, and more. Psychographics include data about things that have already happened-they’re a glance in your customer’s rearview mirror.
Lastly, we have the third leg of the audience insights stool: values. Values are concepts like family, loyalty, personal growth, tradition, or social standing. They represent the things that matter most to us, so it’s no surprise that values play a critical role in our decision-making process. In everything from how we approach our careers and relationships to how we choose a hotel, values drive the process.
Looking at past behaviors through psychographics can be helpful in revealing patterns that hint at future behavior. Similarly, certain demographic realities exist that you can usually rely on (for example, most seventeen-year-olds aren’t going to buy reading glasses). However, a person’s values most accurately predict how they will make decisions, including which hotel they choose to stay in.
How Values Drive Your Guests’ Decisions
If you understand values, you understand people. This is more than a catchy phrase-it’s neurology. Inside your prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain called the insula, and its sole job is to predict future outcomes based on available data. It looks at sights, sounds, smells, and experiences, and it makes decisions by passing that data through just one set of filters: your values.
In other words, when a potential guest chooses between your hotel and your competitor’s, their insula, driven by their values, makes the choice. This is the only way the human brain knows how to make decisions. Every decision, big or small, conscious or subconscious, connects back to the question: “How does this align with my values?”
If you don’t already have data on your guests’ values, that’s okay. By the end of this article, you’ll be equipped with a tool to begin uncovering your target audience’s values. With insight into their values, you can not only engage, motivate, and, ultimately, influence your audience, but you can also find solutions to costly marketing problems.
Increase Brand Consistency
Values hold the key to understanding your guests, and in turn, they provide a path to solutions for many of the largest problems facing the hospitality industry, such as brand consistency.
When you have employees at different locations promoting your brand with incohesive messaging, marketing becomes messy. You might have one hotel advertising its pool and spa while another emphasizes its comfortable rooms, resulting in wildly different expectations and experiences for guests. How do you instead bring unity to your messaging and keep your strategy focused?
You need a way to say, “Our brand is about this,” and values can serve as that consistent North Star. As an example, let’s say the value of Personal Growth drives a brand’s target audience. This brand would want its marketing efforts to communicate that Personal Growth is what guests can expect when they stay at its hotels. What might a brand centered on the value of Personal Growth look like?
In the Personal Growth hotels, all the dining menus have been tuned to include macrobiotic foods that will give guests the energy they need to enjoy their stay. The beds and pillows have been selected because they provide a restful night’s sleep, which allows guests to wake up feeling like a better version of themselves. If a location has a golf course, it doesn’t host a generic yoga class in its fitness studio-it offers a yoga class tailored specifically to stretch and tone muscles used in golf.
In everything this Personal Growth brand does, they’re asking, “How can we elevate our guests’ experience, so they leave better than when they arrived?”
When all of your brand’s stories, initiatives, and social media content deliver more of what your target audience values, it will move the needle on consistent brand identity in the right direction.
Compete in the Era of Online Booking Agencies
Another problem for today’s hospitality industry stems from the prevalence of online booking agencies: how can brands differentiate themselves when guests book through third-party platforms that focus primarily on price?
In the same way that values can create a more consistent brand identity, they can also be what distinguishes your brand from the competition. Consider a hotel brand that has identified Social Standing as a core value of its target audience. Unlike the guests in our first example, this audience doesn’t care about Personal Growth-they care about letting everyone know they’re staying at the fanciest hotel in town.
How could this hotel center the guest experience on the value of Social Standing? They could start by giving each guest an umbrella or bag with a prominent logo on it-anything the guest can carry around town that sends the message “I’m staying at the luxury hotel.” They might leave complimentary postcards in the desk drawer with a little note that says, “Just drop it off at the front desk and we’ll pay the postage.” For the price of a stamp, the hotel gets recommendations sent out to their guests’ friends and family.
By incorporating your guests’ values into the experience, your business can engage in a wholly different way of advertising the hotel. Plenty of hotels have golf courses and pools, so those assets likely won’t differentiate your hotel from the competition. However, give a guest who values Social Standing something as simple as personalized stationery with their name on it, and they’ll remember it-and talk about it to other potential guests-for years.
The more advertising your guests do for you, whether by word of mouth or social media channels, the more direct bookings you’ll gain and the fewer commissions you’ll pay to online booking agencies.
Find Innovative Solutions to Outdated Marketing Practices
For many in the hospitality industry, it’s both an exciting and frightening time as leaders debate how-or if-to incorporate new technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and chatbots into their operations. Like the previous two problems I discussed, updating your marketing practices is another area in which values fit into the solutions.
In today’s changing marketing landscape, measuring the effectiveness of your strategies is a must. The more data you have about your audience, the more strategic you can be when applying emerging technologies to your business. If you recall the three-legged stool of audience insights, your customer data isn’t complete without an understanding of your audience’s values. Moreover, values-driven insights will be crucial when it comes to effectively applying new technologies.
Despite all the innovations happening in the marketing industry, one fact remains: values still drive human decision-making, and that isn’t going to change.
New technologies may be able to help your team work faster, but they still need to be based on a values-driven strategy to reach the heart of your target audience. In other words, values aren’t going anywhere. Shift to a values-driven strategy now, and you’ll have the data you need to walk confidently into the technological future.
To Speak to Your Guests’ Values, You Must First Identify Them
A values-driven marketing strategy can be the key to solving marketing problems and crafting an experience that-as Maya Angelou famously put it-“slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” But you can’t speak to your audience’s values if you don’t know what they are.
Imagine one audience that values Belonging and wants to feel like Norm from Cheers when they walk into the lobby, while another values Independence and wants a streamlined, digital check-in process. To take the ideal approach for one and apply it to the other would be a huge miss. Trying to guess values won’t work-survey data shows that people can have any of fifty-six distinct values-so what can you do to discover what matters most to your audience?
Accurate and in-depth ways to identify values exist, like working directly with a values-focused agency. However, you can start to get to know your audience by asking the following three telltale questions:
“Why do you go to work?”
People will answer everything from, “I just need to pay the bills,” or, “I’m saving up so my kids can go to college,” to, “My work is my creative outlet.” These answers might sound surface level, but through them, people often reveal their values: Financial Security, Family, Creativity, and more.
“Why would you give away half of your lottery winnings?”
This seems like a fun question, but people’s answers tend to touch on important subjects, such as, “I want to make a difference in the world,” or, “I want to help people in need.” In asking these questions, you’re listening for patterns that can clue you in on an individual’s values.
“If you could write a letter today to yourself from ten years in the past, what would you say and why?”
People will give you answers like, “I’d tell myself about the stock market.” Your follow-up question should be, “Why?”
“So I could have a bunch of money,” they’ll answer.
“Why is that important?”
Eventually, if you ask “why” enough times, you’ll reach the level of values and get to know what matters most to your target audience.
Train as many people in your organization as possible to adopt these questions into their conversations with guests. It’s fine to put the questions into their own words or ask them exactly as they’re written, whichever feels more comfortable. Encourage your team to have these conversations at check-in, in your restaurants, or waiting at the valet-anywhere a discussion with guests fits naturally-and collect the data.
As I mentioned, there are more in-depth methods to explore your audience’s values, but even these simple questions will give you more insight into who your audience is and what they want from the guest experience than relying on demographics alone.
Values Can Improve Your Business and the World
Somebody once told me that people aren’t interested in what you’re interested in-they’re interested in what you can tell them about what they’re already interested in. I like to summarize the concept as “bring a log for their fire.”
When you speak to your customers’ values through your marketing and guest experiences, you’re stoking their fire. You’re giving them an experience they’ll remember because it connects to the values driving them in everything they do.
Not only can shifting from demographics to values solve problems and materially improve your business, but it can change the way you impact and connect with people for the better too. Making judgments based on how a person looks on the outside doesn’t amount to understanding. On the contrary, the longer we use demographic stereotypes to define each other, the longer we perpetuate myths that lead to prejudice and discrimination.
There’s a better way to understand people, whether in marketing or any other interaction, and it’s through values. Change the way you look at people, and we can change the world.
This article was originally published on HotelExecutive
