In 1995, Norwegian Cruise Line, a company that I have long suspected must have the industry's most interesting marketing meetings, was coming under new management. It hired one of Madison Avenue's best-known, most creative ad agencies, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, to come up with a new approach to defining its product in the media. The agency came up with the tag line "It's different out here."
Whether or not you liked this particular campaign, it did position Norwegian as a company willing to try new things. It showed a company that was willing to break away from the pack with an emphasis on the experience at sea instead of deals and discounts.
But the sales side of the business, the agency distribution system, was never willing to rebrand itself, and agencies seem to have a hard time seeing themselves as products in and of themselves. You just don't hear much talk about agency "brands." The result is that while it may be "different" out there on the ships at sea, inside the agencies that sell those ships, not that much has changed.
Of course we've all been affected by the new technologies. But we have resisted change in terms of the manner in which we deal with clients. We sell, but we just can't seem to answer the most fundamental question that can be posed to an agency owner: "How is your brand different from competing brands?"
Agents look at market share. They understand who is taking away their clients. Sometimes they even know why. Agents also know how to try to go after new clients. But how well would you be able to answer a question I ask all of my consulting clients in our initial conversation: "What differentiates your brand from the competition?"
Sellers of travel -- inside and outside sellers, those who sell from a headset and those who sell off a GDS -- always see a "brand" as something they sell, a product. But I believe that any agency can and should be on a path leading to the creation of their own special branding.
Who says a travel agency can't be branded? Who says that an agency can't define itself and choose its own special approaches to helping Americans utilize their leisure time in the most rewarding ways? Why do we always let suppliers define us, instead of standing up and defining ourselves?
If the word "brand" scares you, I completely understand. It scared me at one point in my life. When industry friends suggested some years ago that my firm was a brand, I thought they were taking rather fanciful liberties with the English language. We certainly had no intention of creating a brand when we launched our firm in 1987. We just didn't look at it that way. But we did have the "Zigzag File."
Having worked for one of the major cruise lines and covering large portions of the country, I had been inside a great many travel agencies. After more than a decade of marketing discussions with agency owners, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to zig while the rest of the industry zagged. I suppose in doing so, we have developed a brand of sorts.
But the Zigzag File had a lot of ideas we had collected over the years to sell travel in a way that often seemed to run counter to industry practice. Let me share just a few of them with you.
The world is not waiting for a slew of more travel agencies. But a significant portion of the population is looking for a new approach to travel that is based on high ethical standards, modern technologies and an approach that is absent the advertising hype and outright lies that, all too often, accompany the purchase of travel products.
1) We decided to never use the term travel agent or travel agency. Everyone else did that. We would be consultants and advisers. We would work by appointment.
2) We never bought the idea of a store that "sells everything travel-related." The consumer, we decided, was too smart to be fooled by claims that "we do everything well, and we sell everything because, if you purchase a ticket to Las Vegas, you will come back to purchase a world cruise from us the next year." That argument never held water. They don't come back. More times than not, the consumer will seek out someone who is a world cruise specialist.
3) Travel firms can't be branded without clearly delineating which products they will not sell. If you are not willing to be known by the company you keep, you will never be a brand. But getting products off your shelf takes a business plan built on a platform of confidence in your vision. Don't sell European tour operators. Sell the two best tour operators to Europe in each price category, and be prepared to explain how you reached your decision. Your clients need to feel that you are so discriminating in your choices, that the very idea that you sell something is a strong endorsement.
4) Brands identify with their customers. This means never talking down to clients and never lying to them. Suppliers, of course, make this mistake all the time, and in doing so they diminish the value of their brand. "Free air" is never free. The assumption is that the consumer is too dumb to know that, so it is left to the agent to carefully explain why the supplier has come up with this marketing ploy. There can be one "truthful" brand in every town in America.
5) We learned to create our own ratings of the best travel products in every category. Then we announced to our clients that we only sell the top 10 or the top five products in each category. We prepare written explanations of our ratings. We align ourselves on the side of the consumer, and we do not recommend any travel product that is not the best option for the consumer. Commission plays no role in this process, and we make it a point to keep our sales team in the dark as regards commission rates for various products. If a supplier wants to increase sales at our firm, they can only do so by having the best product in their category.
I like the definition of a brand attributed to Amazon's Jeff Bezos. He wrote, "A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."
Just because it is hard is no excuse to choose cloning over branding.
Contributing editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm that has been named to Conde Nast Traveler's list of the World's Top Travel Specialists since the list began. Contact him at rturen@travelweekly.com.