"The medium is the message."

Marshall McLuhan wasn’t talking about advertising when he coined that phrase, but we think it applies anyway.

If you want prospective customers to see you as a for-real provider of goods or services, it’s important that you look like one. That is to say, if you’re going to promote yourself with ordinary, home-grown advertising and an amateurish website, you’re telling your prospects that you think home-grown and amateurish is good enough. That’s not a message you want to deliver.

The past couple of years have been tough and many of you have been cornered into making do with a bit of DIY that really didn’t do the job. Well, it’s time to move on from that.

Besides, if you think about it, perception being what it is and people being what they are, a better look can help you charge more. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

It won’t cost you that much to get a professional to build your website, develop a marketing communications program or produce creative materials. And it won’t cost you anything to expect the people you have already hired to do those things to do them well. But there are significant dividends for you in the perception department if you do.

We know a guy who doesn’t know a lot about wine, so he usually selects one with what he thinks is a good-looking label. His rationale is that, while he knows vineyards aren’t in the design business, he figures if they aren’t going to go to the trouble to have a good label design done,  how can he believe they are going to make the effort to produce a good wine?

His thinking may be his very own, but the underlying approach makes sense. To paraphrase Forrest Gump “quality is as quality does.”

Your advertising and web presence are expected to do a lot of things. But one of them is to be interesting and well-done enough to get people to be impressed with you and want to look inside or learn more.

So do that.

________________________________________________________________________

Your competititon can be your BFF

Hotels: your competition can be your BFF. 

For a while.

Right now, the hospitality industry is playing catch-up after months in the desert.

And the fact is, nothing can be more powerful or cost-effective for bringing guests back than marketing and advertising. Nothing. But with revenues down, money for that stuff can be hard to come by. And there’s the rub.

Why not join with some other hotels or resorts in town and pool your resources? That’s right, work with the competition. Even if just for a while.

You can save a lot of money. Because there are agencies out there who will work with a group of hotels or resorts in an arrangement where each individual hotel will pay far less as part of a group than they would on their own. Each with a share of an agency and the work it can do for them.

We’re one of those agencies.

We’re open to — and looking for — all sorts of creative arrangements. (It’s been an interesting couple of years for hospitality agencies, too.)

And let’s be honest. Y’all don’t really have any secrets from one another. You all subscribe to STR reports and your comp set isn’t exactly made up of strangers. Just don’t hook up with your direct competitors. 

Get together and sell the neighborhood — like downtown hotels or beachfront hotels. Sell a group of boutiques. Or put together a group that can sell the variety you and your co-conspirators offer. Maybe one of you is in Old Town. Another is on the beach. A third is in the heart of the restaurant district and one is an all-suites property. 

You don’t even have to actually market yourselves together. You could just put together a sort of "buying group" that will make it more cost-efficient for you and an agency to do business.

Working with other hotels and resorts in town may present some issues, but when you weigh the money each of you will save by working together against the challenge of sorting out a few issues, it’s certainly worth a think.

And, as we said, we’re open to it.

___________________________________________________________________________