Failure makes better hotel marketers

Embracing failure isn’t something you might immediately associate with Dame Kelly. She is after all a double Olympic champion. Those of you who can only remember her mighty gold medal winning performances against the best in the world might not remember equally gritty running against athletes of the calibre of Maria Mutola when she didn’t win gold. If you go far enough back, you’ll find Dame Kelly has had a career plagued by injury which has caused her to withdraw from other Olympic finals.

She is familiar with failure. She learned how to deal with it, she learned from it and she rose to become an Olympic champion.

From a personal perspective, she is one of my all-time favourite champions.


Returning to the world the rest of us live in – how good at we at dealing with failure?

In terms of marketing our hotels it might be fair to say “not very good”.

During a meeting with a client earlier this week, the topic of marketing skills in hotel businesses became the subject of heated debate.

“Hoteliers are fundamentally lazy when it comes to marketing”.

“They want it all to cost nothing and they want it all to happen yesterday”.

…and then the final nail in the coffin,

“They just won’t make the effort. They’d rather sit there with empty rooms instead of applying some thought to marketing, then when they realise their hotel is empty they just drop their prices to bargain basement levels. It’s crazy!”

I had to agree. However the more I thought about it, the more I started to feel that there must be a reason for hoteliers not wanting to make the effort with their business marketing.

Could it be that the reason is fear of failure?

We live in an age – and we’ve been living in it for a number of years now – where failure is regarded as “a bad thing”. Competition has been eroded for fear of hurting people’s feelings or making them feel bad.
Kids at school don’t come second in the egg-and-spoon race any more, instead they come “differently first”.
You don’t have winners and losers. Instead you have winners and “runners-up”.

Almost a generation has been brought up without learning how to compete properly.

The first lesson of competing is learning how to take part – learning how to play the game.
The second lesson of competing is learning how to win. In order to win, you need to experience loss. You need to know what losing feels like, how it grabs you in the pit of your stomach and how it makes you hurt.

Winning is a combination of ability, skill, preparation and luck.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get” – Gary Player

However people who have always “won” never learn why they win. They never learn what it was that worked and they never learn how to cope with losing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to be a winner. It’s the best habit around – but if you’ve always “won” you never learn how to recover from losing and it can come as quite a shock.

We only ever learn something as a result of things not working, not going right – we only really learn as a result of failure. Failure is the spur to review what you did, to ask questions, to identify answers and to revise your approach for the next time.

In sporting terms when you get beaten, you might resolve to get fitter, to practise and develop your skills, to improve your awareness or to prepare better.

Let’s go back to our thoughts about marketing for hotels. There are a lot of hotels who won’t engage in marketing – they won’t “play” or compete in the market.

There are a number of reasons why this could be. For example, lots of hotels are run on the “we built it so they will come” principle.

The specific reason I want to explore with you today is this. Fear of failure.

Fear of waste. Fear of not achieving a result. Fear of ridicule. Fear of being ignored.

These are just some of the excuses people give me for not wanting to engage in proper marketing activity.

I put it to you that a lot of hotel owners and managers don’t “compete” in a marketing sense because of one or all of these fears (or perhaps a fear that I haven’t thought of yet?).

Let’s think about these for a moment.

Fear of waste

You might be familiar with this quote, attributed to John Wanamaker (a merchant in the USA over 100 years ago),

“I know half my advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

In reality these days it’s more like 99% of your advertising that is wasted, such is the clamour for the attention of the buyer. So it’s understandable that hoteliers perceive spending on advertising as a waste. The problem of not advertising is twofold: 1) if you’re not reaching out to potential customers, how are they going to know what you can do for them? And 2) if you’re not reaching out to potential customers, you’re leaving an opportunity for somebody else to do it instead.

Most of the job of marketing is about narrowing down the scope for waste. It’s a constant battle to identify what people want to buy, why they want to buy it, then creating goods and services to satisfy those people and finding ways to encourage them to buy those products from you. Given that lots of people don’t buy (from you), there is a therefore a lot of waste. But if you’re not out there learning how all this works, how are you going to find successful methods of gaining new customers and sales? “Luck” perhaps?

Fear of not achieving a result

We’re all driven by some sort of target these days. Hotel general managers especially love giving sales people targets without actually specifying the resources needed to achieve it. If you can’t guarantee a result for a particular marketing activity, you probably won’t be allowed to play with it. In other words if you can’t guarantee a win, you won’t be allowed to compete. How would the Olympics or the football World Cup work if nations only sent teams who could guarantee success?

The hotel industry has an answer to this dilemma of course. It’s called sales commission. Outsourcing the selling function in exchange for a commission on sales guarantees that the hotel only ever pays for results. If the hotel receives no sales it incurs no waste (in terms of financial expenditure – of course there’s the opportunity cost of all those empty rooms to consider). If the hotel achieves sales targets it then pays out the commission – and you’ll be able to hear the manager grumbling about how expensive it was.

The problem is that the hotel never learns how to play the game. The business never learns the rules nor the techniques. Other people in other businesses develop the skills and the stamina. The non-competing hotel manager becomes a sort of marketing couch potato – able to comment on every aspect of the game without any actual experience of the discipline involved. The marketing responsibility has been abdicated and the fear of not achieving the result with it. Of course not achieving the desired result is still possible and the business is left with no understanding of how to deploy marketing tactics. So when somebody decides that you’ve got to do something, the results are a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you need proof, go and look at the dreadful copy most hotel people publish on their websites or the hideous hotel adverts in the Sunday papers.

Fear of Ridicule

The first time you turn up at the training pitch, not at all sure of what to do; the first time you turn up on court and face an opponent in front of other people – you’re often worried about what people will think of your efforts.

So it can be with hotel marketing. If your advert isn’t quite as shiny and “design led” as your more experienced (but not necessarily more successful) competitors; if your voucher doesn’t have quite as strong an offer or as big a discount, you sometimes wonder if people are laughing at you behind your back.

So what? Get out there, play the game, enjoy yourself and grow with the experience. Who cares if you’ve got your shorts on backwards? At least you’re in the loop and doing it. The results will come. They might be quite subtle, but they will come. And then you’ll be able to smile at your increased sales figures. I wonder what the couch potatoes will have to smile about?

Fear of being ignored

It’s a fact. Most advertising, most promotion is ignored. It is the way of things. Learn how to deal with it. If your customers are ignoring you (an empty hotel or restaurant is a good indication that you’re being ignored) then you need to get out there and do something about it. People will still ignore you. People will still not buy the things you’re selling. But you’ll be able to use what you learn to get closer to the people who do want to buy the things you’re selling. It’s not personal. It’s universal.

There’s an old saying in motorsport, “To finish first, you must first finish”. Learn how to get around the track without falling off, keep driving round until you get better, then the results will come.

Conclusion

Fear of failing is preventing some hoteliers from taking part in marketing. If this is you, you need to overcome the fear. You need to learn how to do it right – learn the techniques and practise them regularly.

It’s the learning and practise that hoteliers don’t seem to be able to get their heads around in my experience. There is often many hours of effort put into the creation of one, small advertising headline. Perhaps years of trial, error and effort made to develop one successful package.

All the hotelier often sees is the results others achieve, they don’t consider the hard work that went into them because they don’t understand what’s involved. They haven’t experienced the failure: The adverts that got no response; the direct mail campaign with the 0% return rate or the email blast where no messages were opened.
They haven’t learned to compete, they haven’t taken part and they haven’t had the opportunity to learn from failures.

The next time your marketing doesn’t work, your starting block for success is this statement,

“This effort didn’t work because…”

…and deciding that, “Next time, I’m going to do …, …, and … differently”.

I’m having a go at hotel owners and managers here, because it is YOU who display the greatest fear of failure. It is YOU who can’t handle failure on the part of your marketing people. (Yes it is guys. You know it.)

In a sporting context, there are failures in every event. For every winning football team there are eleven players who lost; for every tennis tournament winner there are hundreds of players who went home early; for every victorious horse there is a field of also rans.

But without these failures, there would be no sport. There could be no winners. It is the competition that creates the skill and capability, not "winning". If every athlete was scared to take to the track because they feared failing, there would be no competition.

With marketing you've got it easy. You can take part, you can practise, you can learn and you can learn how to win without going through the pain each sportsman suffers. But you've got to be ready to let people fail.

Why? Because most marketing fails anyway. Most marketing doesn't work. And if you're not learning how to recognise that failure, you're never going to find the stuff that does work.

As hotel owners and managers, you need to adopt the role of coach. When things go wrong, you need to lead the team through the failure, pick them up, dust them down and get them ready for their next attempt. It is YOUR responsibility to make sure that lessons are learned and embraced to the heart of your business. You need to create an environment where failure works. Failure works when it feeds data, insight and understanding back into your business.

If everyone is scared of failure, nobody will put themselves in a position to fail, nobody will put themselves in a position to learn. Your business will learn nothing and will make no progress.

You’ve got to give your children the opportunity to fail.

It’s the best way to learn.