May 2011 Archives

It's worth quickly making explicit the link between the question 'What do we know about this customer right now?' - Question Three from yesterday - and the revelation that Facebook's PR firm has been placing anti-Google stories in the press.

The Economist's Babbage blog came at the tussle via the firms' respective records on privacy, rightly pointing out that neither is an angel. The point is there's a reason for that - they aren't pushing the boundaries of privacy because they're meanies. They get that deep, near-real-time information on potential clients is the new holy grail of ecommerce, and they get that some combination of 'social' and browsing data has the potential to deliver it.

See also Google CEO Larry Page's staff memo tying bonuses to social media success.

See also the controversial Phorm service, BT's trials of which became the subject of a Crown Prosecution Service investigation.

See also, at sector level, the social media platform for hotels that TrustYou launched at this week's Travel Distribution Summit.

Agents will rightly point out that they've been answering Question Three for decades on a person-to-person basis. What online retailers want is to be able to answer it (or answer it acceptably well) in volume.

 Just pulled this comment off a BusinessWeek blog post about 'Generation Y-ers' in the US drifting away from cable TV subscriptions:

Gen Y can't buy homes, cars (or car insurance) or health insurance because we can't afford it.

...

When you don't have that much money you have prioritize what you need and what you don't need. And that's what we did, partly out of choice but mostly out of necessity.

The focal point for BusinessWeek is how Gen Y's 'unconventional consuming habits' have upset the media and entertainment industries - but other industries will follow, particularly if money's tight.

Will travel slide down the list of priorities? It's become a truism here in the UK that Brits won't forego their holiday, but even if holidays are a ringfenced purchase, how much will the generation currently in their early 20s spend on those holidays? And who with?

Teletext Holidays' Victoria Sanders mused on the effect of squeezed incomes in a column for us this week, arguing that it is fuelling an intensely price-focused 'wait-and-see' approach to purchases that is inherited from the low-cost airline boom of the early 00s. The age of austerity is also an age of spontaneity, as she puts it.

How do we as a trade help and support our customers through these tough decisions? Do we understand enough about changing buying patterns? Do we react quickly enough with 'real' value offers for the destinations and dates our customers are really after?

That reduces to a single question, the third in an evolutionary process that goes something like this:

1. What do we know about our customers?
2. What do we know about this customer?
3. What do we know about this customer right now?