Think Travel 2012

For travel companies looking to grow and innovate, the relationship with today's traveler is key. In travel, it's not just what consumers think of your brand, but how they experience your brand that counts.

This year at Think Travel - the 7th year of the event - we set out to explore why experience matters in travel. Inspired by possibility and empowered by digital, we hope the attendees at our event and you will approach 2013 as a year to truly consider and influence how consumers are finding, interacting with, and feeling about your brand.

  • General Event
  1. Wherever You Want to Go
    • Speaker: Faris Yakob - Chief Innovation Partner, MDC Partners/kbs+ and a founding partner of Spies & Assassins, MDC's mysterious creative technology boutique.
    • Faris' Blog: http://farisyakob.typepad.com/, On Twitter: @faris
    • Key Takeaways:
      • Experience matters - but the experience is not the same thing as the memory. And the memory is not the story told.
      • The story told becomes highlights: beginning, peak and end.
      • Small defining brand gestures - 'winks'- can help change the story. How can we create digital winks?
      • "Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices" - Henry Jenkins, Professor of Comparative Media, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide.
      • Something is happening to be our perception of value in the travel category. We expect a great deal (inflated expectations), but we feel like we're not getting the best deal (reality).
      • Strong brands can create persistent, irrational economic behavior.
      • If you want genuine loyalty, you need to be able to "consistently enrich experience". The consumer needs constant reminding of the magic of the travel experience. And both the unseen experience and the memory of experience are of the utmost importance.
      • Presentation "Experience Matters"
      • Link to TED Talk: Daniel Kahneman: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory
  2. Global Marketing in a Digital World
    • Speaker: Babs Rangaiah - VP Global Media Innovation, Unilever PLC
    • On Twitter: @babs26
    • Key Takeaways:
      • The internet has been radically transformative for global businesses and Unilever has made pro-active changes in their organization and goals, to address global challenges in a digital world.
  3. Redefining Brand for Travel
    • Speaker: Jim Lecinski - VP, Sales - Brand Solutions Sector, Google
    • Key Takeaways:
      • In an always connected four-screen world, the future of brand building becomes an expansive exercise, identifying and winning all the moments that matter for your brand.
      • This stands in contrast to historical thinking that brands must only have a single-minded proposition that they only tell over and over to their "prime prospect" group.
      • Join us for a day at the Google BrandLab to work through a real life actual business challenge with you to build a plan together that wins the moments that matter.... be in touch with your Google account team for more information.
      • Resources: www.zeromomentoftruth.com
  4. Google & Travel
    • Speaker: Kourosh Gharachorloo - Director, Engineering, Google
    • Highlighted Products:
      • Google's Flight Search (link)
      • Google's Hotel Finder (link)
      • Introducing: Google Now (link)
  5. Rethinking Travel Touchpoints in the Digital Age
    • Speaker: Dylan Bolden - Partner and Managing Director, The Boston Consulting Group
    • Key Takeaways:
      • New technologies have transformed the way travel brands are interacting with their customers
        • Travelers are using fewer devices, but interactions with travel companies are more fragmented than ever
        • Leisure travelers spend an average of 42 hours in the travel cycle across 17 of the major travel websites, with the majority of time spent outside the "booking" (and revenue generating) phase
        • Increasingly difficult for brands to effectively drive choice with increased set of touchpoints and time-span
      • Driving bookings start with earning customers' trust, and trust starts with a strong brand
        • Travelers generally trust personal recommendations and reviews over traditional branded media
        • Increased trust improves the likelihood of meeting customers' emotional needs and driving satisfaction
        • And, not surprisingly, increased satisfaction is associated with an increased re-booking rate
      • As consumers and digital touchpoints change around us, organizations are not changing fast enough, and with ever increasing choices, weak brands are quickly getting lost in the mix
        • The overarching organization serves as the delivery mechanism for the brand across multiple channels
        • However, Digital is increasingly becoming the primary the voice of the brand, but is often "silo-ed" and left without the necessary resources to properly execute
        • And Digital is often left to build its own strategy, which may or may not align with the overall brand strategy
      • Travel companies must align around a holistic digital roadmap balancing the consumers' needs (both digital and non-digital consumers), the operating model and the organization
        • Digital marketing has become more than just an e-commerce channel and must have goals beyond purely driving transactions (brand-focused goals)
        • Digital requires more resources "dollars and people" to effectively represent and communicate the brand
        • And Digital Executives must ensure their business strategy is aligned with that of the overall brand
      • Presentation: "Travel Touchpoints in the Digital Age"
      • Additional Resources:
    • Live Hangout: "Views on Reviews"
      • Dave Pavelko - Head of Industry, Travel, Google
      • Participants:
      • Key Takeaways:
        • Reviews, both peer and professional, will continue to be prominent sources for travelers when making decisions.
        • Negative Reviews present an overwhelmingly positive opportunity for a brand to gain credit with consumers. If a user has a bad experience and reports on it, but other consumers can see that the experience was remedied by the brand through a review, it reflects even better on the brand than a simple positive review.
        • While Travel has historically been a transaction-based industry, it's important for leadership in travel companies to recognize the importance of other metrics. Reviews & responses are two of those metrics. Engagement with a brand can move mountains for a company.
    • Make Every Experience Count
      • Speaker: Jane Butler - Managing Director, Travel, Google
      • Key Takeaways:
        • Recommended action items/next steps for travel marketers: 1. Know how you want your customers to feel. 2. Pretend that you're the customer! 3. Experience "finding" and "doing" what a customer would do with your brand. 4. Do an honest assessment. 5. Establish priorities and allocate resources (5a. Identify your key customer segments. 5b. Prioritize your device strategy.)
        • Presentation: "Make Every Experience Count"
        • Additional Resources: Avinash Kaushik: Occam's Razor (Blog) and Google+ Page
    • Advertising Re-imagined
      • Speaker: Mike Glaser - Product Marketing Manager, Google
      • Key Takeaways:
        • Technology has changed the way we communicate, but the fundamentals of great advertising -- emotional connections and storytelling -- remain the same. Our challenge, as an industry, is to now bake these tenets into how we make digital ads. Project Re: Brief let us experiment with that process, along with some of the greatest storytellers in the business.
        • Technology can unlock new creative ideas, making the formerly impossible, possible. When we think of inspiring ads and creative opportunities, it's easy to think back to television. But, in the digital world. there is room for more interaction in advertising.
        • The Project Re: Brief ads show how today's technology enables meaningful connections between online and physical world, create campaigns that are social at their core, build highly immersive experiences and personalized stories; and do so across devices and screens where the modern consumers spend their time.
        • Resources:Project Re:Brief
        • Presentation: "Advertising Re-Imagined"