'Unlock your brand values'
Operators were urged to ask themselves why they create coach holidays as a key to 'unlocking' their brand
values. Sid Madge of Mad Hen told delegates at the 2016 Conference to look again at their marketing and
set aside messages which tell customers 'how' they run tours and 'what' they do for their customers and
instead, begin by telling their market 'why' they are in the holiday business.
He said that strong branding delivers value, both for the customer and for the bottom line: “You need to
ask yourself: 'Are people are paying more money for my brand?' and if not, why not? He said that strong
branding had allowed Coca Cola to demand a premium for flavoured water.
Sid showed delegates the word 'God' in a variety of type styles and colours to prove that we all recognise
brands such as IBM, Lego, Google and even Durex from the colour and graphical style alone – the actual
name of the brand had become unimportant.
“Colour plays a large part in brands,” he said and cited a study which had revealed that consumers
associate, for example, red with excitement. One company, he said, had found that visitors to its website
were 20% more likely to click on a red button than a green one. “70 per cent of professional services use a
blue logo,” he said. “To consumers, blue represents dependability.”
The strength of good brands he said could even subsume the core product. He said Harley Davidson now
made 40 per cent of its profit from licensing the Harley Davidson logo to other products. In a similar vein
he told how Jaguar, despite its strong brand, had managed to tap into a new market of upwardly mobile
consumers, having been seen as an old man's' brand for many years.
Sid strongly urged coach operators to include video in their on-line marketing materials: “A 60-second
video can do more for your marketing than your entire website. People love to see video.”
He also urged operators to make the most of social media such as Facebook, illustrating its power with the
story of a one-woman business who spent £64 on a Facebook campaign and got such a huge business
return that she had to employ two people to cope with demand.
“And look carefully at the words you use in your marketing,” he said. “Are you really selling coach holidays,
or are they holidays by coach?” He said far too much advertising and marketing of coach holidays focused
on the features of the product and too little on the benefits; for example, mentioning door-to-door pickups without saying this means not having to handle heavy suitcases: “You have to look at your product and
ask yourself 'Where are the benefits?' and then explain these to consumers first.”
'Social media – be in it to win it' says Hoda
Social media expert Hoda Lacey cautioned coach holiday operators against selling products through social
media and said they should use Facebook, for example, to 'humanise' their brands. “Social media is a term
used to describe any tool or service on the internet used to facilitate conversation,” she said. “Most people
do not like being sold to on social media.”
She outlined the demographic of people using social media and said that some channels such as Facebook
were increasingly being used by the over 50s. She said the users of social media could be roughly divided
into 'digital visitors' who go into social media with a particular task in mind and 'digital natives' who
routinely spend large amounts of time on social networks: “Many younger users are now living their lives
on-line,” she said.
To get the best from social media, she set out a five-point plan:
 Decide what you want to achieve
 Create your customer persona, or avatar
 Humanise your brand
 Choose your social media channels
 Then analyse your results and adapt your approach
Hoda suggested operators should focus on raising awareness and encouraging loyalty through social
media, then capturing data of visitors, but not selling anything through social media: “Look at the singer
Adele's social media; no mention of selling on social media but her social media feeds back into her
website, on which there are things to buy. It's very subtle.”
She also suggested that all coach holiday operators should create a customer profile – a highly focused
profile of the typical customer, which may include their age, sex, hobbies, financial situation, their
aspirations and even their names – and ensure staff know who this is: “This will make a huge amount of
difference to your marketing. It will mean your marketing 'voice' is speaking to one customer and will
make for a more authentic conversation,” she said.
Hoda said operators who restricted themselves to one kind of customer were making a mistake. She said it
was not true that only 'old people' take coach holidays, citing the example of Kontiki and backpacker
brands like Busabout tours which carry huge numbers of young people. For each market she said, you
need a different approach and a different customer profile.
She said video was king on the internet and singled out videos created by Greys of Ely and Johnsons
Coaches as great examples of video content which can boost the operator's image on-line. But summing
up, she warned that opening your company to social media demands that you develop a 'rhino skin' and
exposes your operation to exposed comments – both good and bad.