Travel Insights: Values in Travel
Travel & Tourism
Pretty sure it was John Mellencamp who sang, “You gotta stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” Heckuva marketer that Mellencamp. First the whole “Cougar” name change thing, and then this. Smart guy.
What’s so smart (and seemingly so simple) about that particular song is the whole idea of standing for something.
An awful lot of brands these days are falling for anything – chasing the latest trends, trying to capitalize on the loudest buzzwords, traipsing lemming-like after this audience, that new social media platform or that data-capturing dashboard.
But very few end up rising above the rest. Leaping ahead. Standing out.
At BVK, we talk about human values and travel brands a lot. Last month we shared a blog about what value-based positioning is and how it allows brands to connect in meaningful ways to their audiences, resulting in business success. This month we wanted to demonstrate it through an exercise where we identified 5 core human values (of Excellence, Togetherness, Betterment, Originality, and Discovery) and 5 brands across the travel industry who could embody each associated value if we were to conduct our value-based positioning process with them.
This abbreviated process is outlined for each example with three simple pieces by
- highlighting the value,
- showing the human craving, and
- revealing the brand example that could own each value
The brands we selected to embody each value are all influential in the travel industry. All venerable brands that have withstood the test of time (admittedly some longer than others), and that stand out amongst their respective peer groups.
We don’t believe their success is luck, or happenstance. We kinda think it might be in part because they’ve each chosen to stand for something. We encourage you to learn more from these examples in our visual deck at the link below.
To paraphrase another line from that Mellencamp song, brands know a lot of things, but they don’t know a lot of other things. If you’re one of those brands and you want to know how to uncover that singular value, give us a shout and we’ll walk you through how we think about it and how we’d make sure your consumers know what you stand for.
