HOSPITALITY: The Gift Shop Comes to the Guest Room.

Upscale hospitality marketers would be well-advised to forever delete the catchphrase "all the comforts of home" from their marketing communications. The reason? A fast-growing in-room catalog and e-commerce service called Hotels at Home.

Launched in 2000, Hotels at Home today services almost 3,000 hotels — including the Hilton, Sheraton and Westin brands — and 750,000 hotel rooms worldwide. As a free extension (yes, you read correctly, free) of the client hotel's marketing program, Hotels at Home creates an integrated marketing program that includes branded-to-client catalog, website and other components. Products for purchase can include virtually anything the hotel wishes to offer — from traditional bathrobes and coffee mugs, to mattresses, blankets, furniture, even artwork. Hotels at Home purchases these items from the client's vendors, stocks them and ships them, all for a percentage of sales. So all the comforts of home would, in theory, be the comforts of the hotel. Get it?

While Hotels at Home may not generate a significant revenue stream for upscale properties, NOISE believes the branding cache that the service provides, in delivering a perception of extreme quality that's packaged to your unique brand (and did we mention, it's free?), is well worth investigating. Learn more at hotelsathome.com.

SOURCE: Marketing News, NOISE
Reported by: John Sprecher

ADVERTISING: When Selecting an Agency, Size Doesn't Matter.

In America, the thinking forever has tended to go: bigger is better. But that isn't necessarily true as it relates to selecting an advertising agency, according to a recent issue of Ad Age. In the article, author Eric Webber (formerly of mega agencies and now leading a boutique firm) opines that smaller agencies are by nature more nimble, adaptable and resourceful — which is ultimately good for everyone. He goes on to note that:

1. Small agencies don't have silos (or if they do, they're not very tall). In mega-agency worlds, billable rates are too sky-high to spend time in collaboration with adjacent groups. In smaller agencies, other departments — media, interactive, PR — can drop in on meetings with creative teams and copywriters to give ideas early on in the process. At NOISE, it's our practice to build a team of multi-disciplinarians to tackle a branding, marketing or imaging challenge, because odds are an integrated approach will be most effective.
2. The best small agencies adhere to mega-agency disciplines like strategic, goal-driven branding and marketing — but instill their work with passion, creativity, dare and (dare we say it?) risk that most large firms squash. The proof? It’s becoming almost commonplace at awards ceremonies to see "David" agencies sweeping the creative floor with the “Goliaths." (Plug alert: Witness NOISE's dominattion last month of the 2007 Southwest Florida Addy Competition, with 42 awards, plus Best-of-Show. And NOISE's March, 2008 invitation to pitch the California Division of Tourism's Interactive Marketing Division.)

We work in an interesting time. The theoretical critical mass cost efficiencies at larger advertising agencies are clearly being outweighed by the insane amounts of money these firms charge. Many of these firms are rife with safe thinking, wet-upon passions and a me-first mentality. Just a few years ago, merger mania was seeming to threaten the existence of any agency with less than 50 employees. But in the true spirit of Trendspottings, we've spotted a change in that trend — and the boutique agency may be more popular than ever for a variety of service, attention, creativity, passion, cost, results and other factors.

Source: Ad Age, NOISE
Reported by: Kimberley Parker

CONSUMERS: It's the Luxury Economy, Stupid.

It what appears to be yet another troubling sign for our economy (not that signs advertising $4 per gallon diesel fuel aren't troubling enough), along comes Unity Marketing's "Luxury Consumption Index," a quarterly survey that examines the spending pattern of more than 1,000 consumers with an average income in excess of $150,000.

In what should come as no surprise to any marketer that targets an audience with discretionary income, luxury consumer confidence in our economy is eroding just like everyone else's — and with it, so also is luxury consumer spending. According to the fourth quarter 2007 Luxury Consumption Index, spending by higher income consumers in America dropped to its lowest level in four years — almost 13% off of average.

If nothing else, this weak performance at the top of the economic pyramid confirms what many discretionary-dollar marketers have seen or suspected for a long time. Our advice if you target big spenders? Get with your marketing people, your agency or both right now, assemble in a room, close the door, put your thinking caps on and don't come out until you've developed some creative packaging, partnering, pricing or value-added promotions that'll incent those consumers to open their wallets for you.

Or call us.

SOURCE: Marketing Management, NOISE

BRANDING: When Is a Warranty Worth More Than a Customer?

That was the question I was asking myself when I hung up the phone a few weeks ago following a surreal conversation with the manager of Florida Leather Gallery in Bonita Springs, Florida. Florida Leather Gallery is an upscale furniture retail chain with headquarters in Tampa.

The issue at hand (or better, my three-year-old's hand) was the pink children's marker he had taken to an arm and seat cushion of our new, cream-colored couch. Fortunately for us, we had purchased the extended five-year warranty to cover occasions just like this. Or so we thought.

What transpired over the course of numerous phone calls was, in fact, surreal-like. The bottom line: the store manager essentially blew up his brand, by insisting that his $200 in warranty was more important than our satisfaction (and word of mouth referral).

To him, it didn't matter that we had specifically asked of his salesperson if such damage by a child was covered (this wasn't the first time our artist son has expressed himself with marker). It didn't matter that his salesperson said yes. It didn't matter that he, the store manager, expressed surpirse that the warranty vendor (an independent company in Michigan) rejected our claim. It didn't matter that we had spent thousands of dollars on quality furniture, from a quality furniture store, and that this negative experience could forever taint our perception of his brand. He was not going to refund us a dime on what we believed was, now, a toothless warranty!

Clients, vendors, friends: This is the essence of what NOISE preaches when we say, "the customer experience IS your brand."

At that point in our minds, Florida Leather Gallery was that store manager. Cheap. Intractable. More interested in keeping the $200 or so they made off our warranty, than in our satisfaction, word of mouth referrals, and potential future purchases.

Fortunately for Florida Leather Gallery, their president, Tom Matter, knows more about branding than his store manager. To his credit, he seized the opportunity I presented him by way of a copied letter to the store manager, to place a personal telephone call to us, at which time he apologized, rebated us the warranty cost, and funded the warranty himself.

Lesson: Your customer's experience is your brand. That experience can be defined from the global (mass media advertising) to the trivial (a rude customer service representative). Make sure that every messenger of your brand speaks the same message, makes the same promise, and delivers the same positive experience. Or you, too, could wind up losing thousands of dollars of future sales over a couple of bucks.