New York Hospitality by Vijay Dandapani

The Mommy Market: reaching out to Mama bloggers

The original Mommy Market is a 1993 movie about 3 children who erase memories of their disgruntled and harried mother via magic to get a new mother in a "Mommy Market".  Today's Mommy Market, is very real and ought to be very welcoming for its enormous potential to affect buying decisions in a variety of fields including hotels according to the specialist emarketing website emarketer.com. Made up of a diverse and growing group of mama bloggers, these bloggers have one thing in common, all are mothers with a blog. But they all offer opinions, advice, expertise and, most importantly, steer purchases in numerous ways.

Emarketers notes that they have become important marketing partners and powerful allies, spreading the word about products and services to the 32 million moms who go online in the US. The number of moms who blog is far larger than the so-called mommy blogger community. In total, there are 3.9 million women with children under 18 who write blogs, covering a wide variety of subjects, including parenting, couponing, travel, automobiles and technology. While they share one thing in common—having children—they are a diverse group, which is a benefit and a challenge for marketers. The website also suggests that marketers maximize their efforts to reach moms who read and write blogs by aligning their blog marketing with their marketing on Facebook and Twitter. Moms who use blogs also tend to be frequent social media users.

Recently a New York Times article underscored the power of mommy bloggers noting that major corporates have  sent popular mommy bloggers to the Beijing Olympics (Sponsored by Procter & Gamble) and to the Oscars (courtesy of Kodak) besides a road-trip to Disney World in a Chevy Traverse. No major hotel players yet but it likely won't be long before resorts and city center hotels follow suit.

Finding a "central" place to reach a substantial number of mommy bloggers remains a challenge due to the fragmented and diverse nature of topics, lack of metrics or even their viability. A few sites purport to be a catch-all but are unlikely to span the gamut of issues and momma bloggers. Many such as Mom Bloggers Club (which even has an affiliation with a UK club) already have prepared media-kits for prospective advertisers. There, however, is no independent affirmation, yet, of their relevance and it is probably caveat-emptor for anyone looking to spend ad dollars.  Nevertheless, it is a compelling demographic to explore and exploit for marketing.

 

 

Advertising a firm's best asset: Customer Service Reps

The New York Times section on Media and Advertising has an interesting article on the customer and internet savvy retailer, Zappos which was recently acquired by the even savvier Amazon. The article notes that "In a (ad) campaign scheduled to begin on Monday (March 8th 2010), Zappos will celebrate its customer service representatives, whom the company refers to as the customer loyalty team. The intent is to demonstrate to potential customers — and remind current ones — how the employees make it easy to order or return merchandise, either on Zappos.com or by calling a toll-free number."  The article also quotes a Mullen (the ad company that created the ad) executive as saying that employees would "would stay on the line for as long as you wanted to talk. They would talk about anything.” A Zappos director also notes that "our customer loyalty team is not scripted and is not measured on time of calls." 

Clearly Zappos is a customer service darling and a principal reason is that they view their call center not as a cost but as a primary value driver. Historically most companies, including in the hospitality industry  relegated call centers to remote parts of the country and, increasingly, out of the country resulting in poor CRM outcomes. Leveraging technology positively - as opposed to inserting it as a barrier as in the case of airlines and even some hotels - requires a more inclusive approach to employees. That means giving customer service reps more leeway in dealing with customers including allowing them to determine the length of a call per the customers' needs. Software that merely measures time spent per reservation (for hotels)  most probably will not serve the company well. Instead a measure of additional services and packages and even room nights sold by CSRs will better serve the employer. Also to be measured, as a consequence,  is employee churn and absenteeism; both ought to be less.

The other seemingly obvious benefit to the ad campaign is better employee morale. Exposure to potential customers as models of what employees are truly about enables higher productivity and better customer-employee relations. Naturally, in the end, that results in a happier customer with the resulting higher profits mitigating any increase in call center costs. The Times article also cites other employee-centric marketers including Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, Lowes, Nationwide Insurance, Toyota Motor  and Verizon. Apparently no hotel companies made the cut.