Category Archives: selling

selling

‘Exciting and dynamic times’: how the PPA reminds us of the key components of any media conference

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yesterday Mediation popped along to the PPA's Magazine Advertising Conference and Awards 2008, held at the IMAX.  media conferences really are a wonder to behold and the PPA's effort was no exception, with several key components of any decent conference on display (no pun intended)…

selective use of stats are out in force to make convoluted promotional statements about the channel… in 70% of product categories, for example, magazines drive more online sales than any other medium.  who knew?

awards are a must.  my best of the morning being 'The Industry's favourite Magazine Cover' (for the record it was the above Superman Returns effort by Empire).

fat words like 'relevant' and 'engaging' are compulsory in every sentence, and a host of industry heavyweights are rolled out to half inspire us and half self-promote they own pet agenda.  to be fair John Grant was on his usual excellent form, reminding us that the new media attack is centralised on distribution whilst actually supporting the creation and filtering of great content.

but the best and most compulsory part of any media conference is the plain, unabashed optimism that oozes from every syllable.  there are no challenges, only opportunities.  consumption never goes down, consumers just get more sophisticated.  but above all conditions are never bad.  this is really important.  our beloved western economy isn't teetering on the brink, it's just going thru an 'exciting and dynamic' phase.

and for all their flaws, this is what we love.  in an all-too-often cynical industry, it's quite right that a media channel can put on it's finest and sell it to the world…  it's a testament to the passion our industry has for what it does.  and besides, who wouldn't want to live in such exciting and dynamic times?

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selling

How Burn offers a simple solution to what to ask for at the bar

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so I end up doing a fair bit of thinking on how broadcast messages can influence decision making at the point of purchase.  here’s a great little solution from Tours in France that gets le barmen to suggest how people should mix their energy drink.

the barman makes the suggestion and the customer gets the opportunity to try something new without feeling the potential intimidation of having to ask a barman what he recommends…  very simple, very neat and very based in a brand and consumer problem.

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CRM-ing, internet, selling

The Double-Edged Sword of Hoxton Hotel’s £1 Room Sale

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so I’ve just bagged a room at the Hoxton Hotel  (the £17m establishment opened in 2006 by Pret founder Sinclair Beecham) in their sale…  a quarterly event which this time round offered 500 rooms at £1 and 500 rooms at £29 to the first to book them online from noon today.  the sale lasted 19 minutes.

as expected, online demand at the booking engine was high and much page refreshment was required before I finally got to the booking.  others didn’t make it…  a friend messaging online commented on the frustration being felt (and verbally articulated) around his office.

these frustrations were acknowledged by the Hotel’s General manager David Taylor, who in an online statement after the sale commented:

"The booking engine once again struggled to keep up with the huge
number of people trying to book rooms …  We are sorry if you were not successful, We are sorry of the booking engine stalled on you, We are sorry that not everyone could be a winner"

and that’s the problem with sales like this, the CRM fall-out can be painful.  the website experienced 500,000 hits in the 19 minute duration of the sale, with only 1,000 ‘winners’, that potentially leaves 499,000 disappointed potential customers.  but there’s a flipside…  boy is there a flipside.

using the lowest standard room rate of £59 as a base, the sale cost the Hotel £44,000 worth of income.  but to recoup this income Hoxton has (only) to sell 746 rooms it otherwise wouldn’t have done.  so of the half a million hits they received today, they only have to convert 0.0015% of them to get the money back.  which shouldn’t be too tall an order at all.

but money aside, the sale is delivering across a number of other key metrics.  I’m willing to bet the quarterly spikes in the below Google Trends result for ‘Hoxton Hotel’ is driven by their quarterly sales.Googletrends_hoxton_hotel

added to this increase in website traffic is the surge of new email addresses and mobile phone numbers to their database (I surprised myself at how much personal information I was happy to throw at the website when the clock was against me), and of course the word of mouth effect that this generates…  I found out about the sale from a friend, who found about it from his friend, who in turn found out about it from his girlfriend who was already on the database.

it’s one hell of a sales promotion that can generate this kind of response whilst almost certainly paying for itself…   a double edged sword it may be, but I’m sure it’s one that this Hotel is more than happy to wield.

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