Menu
Menu
Stop Treating Innovation Like a Rescue Strategy
When demand is soft, one phrase has a remarkable ability to find its way into the conversation.
“Think outside the box.”
The four words that have launched a thousand brainstorming sessions.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A good marketing team should never stop analyzing campaigns, optimizing conversion and looking for opportunities to grow demand.
Yet there is an assumption that somewhere inside every marketing department is a secret drawer full of creative ideas waiting for the right desperate moment to deploy.
If that is how your marketing department operates, you have a different problem.
But before we start tweaking creative or launching another promotion, it might be worth figuring out what actually changed.
Because “down” is not a diagnosis, and experimental marketing is not a rescue strategy.
In fact, the worst time to suddenly develop an appetite for unproven marketing is when business is soft, budgets are tightening and everyone is looking for immediate results.
That is when discipline matters most.
Innovation should be a pipeline, not a panic button.
Demand Starts Before Your Hotel
When business is down, we have a tendency to diagnose by proximity.
Rates must be wrong. Sales and Marketing aren’t producing enough. Guest service must be slipping.
But more often, the issue is bigger than your hotel.
Let’s start with what “down” actually means.
A property can be down 10% and still outperform a market down 20%. It can also be up 5% and lose ground in a market that grew 20%.
Which raises the bigger question: how do you know how your market is really performing?
Most hoteliers rely heavily on STR. In many markets, it is effectively the only meaningful benchmark available.
But even CoStar has acknowledged how challenging it can be to predict true market demand. In fact, they recently pulled hotel performance forecast data altogether, citing volatility in forecast projections.
And volatility is only one limitation.
STR still captures just one segment of a much larger accommodation ecosystem. In one prominent market where we operate, it represents less than 20% of the available lodging.
Useful? Absolutely. Gospel? Hardly.
So widen the lens.
Lean on your local destination marketing organization (DMO) for more data. Is visitation up or down? Have airlines added or eliminated direct routes? How is vacation rental affecting the market? Are hospitality tax collections rising or falling? Has the DMO changed its marketing strategy? Is consumer search interest in the destination growing or shrinking?
Most hoteliers know surprisingly little about their DMO, the organization responsible for driving demand to the entire destination.
Sadly, hotel marketers love to believe our brilliant campaigns are responsible for all that demand.
Truth is, most of it is created further upstream.
The destination creates consumer intent. Our job as hotel marketers is to harvest it.
That doesn’t mean you have to wait helplessly for whatever demand happens to show up.
At BRH, we actively participate in our DMOs and serve in leadership roles ranging from marketing councils to board chair because we are not content to sit back and wait for our share of demand. We want to help create it.
Sometimes your hotel doesn’t need more marketing.
Your market does.
Think Inside the Box
What exactly is wrong with the box?
Somewhere along the way, “inside the box” became synonymous with stale thinking, while everything outside it became innovative by default.
That makes no sense.
The box is where the things that have already proven they work live.
Search. Email. CRM. Direct mail. Social. Distribution. Conversion optimization. Analytics. Remarketing.
None of those are particularly sexy anymore.
They are not supposed to be. They are supposed to work.
At BRH, our formula has always been pretty simple: relentlessly execute the fundamentals better than our competitors while dedicating a portion of our resources to finding what comes next.
While others are chasing shiny objects, we are trying to squeeze another percentage point out of conversion, sharpen communication, improve distribution and get incrementally better at the things that already produce results.
That does not mean we stop looking for the next big thing.
Every year we test new technology, new platforms, new channels and new ideas. Some fail quickly. Some show promise. A few eventually prove they deserve a larger investment.
Keep scaling them, and eventually they stop being experiments.
They become part of the box.
That is the whole point of experimentation. The goal is not to permanently live outside the box. It is to find the next thing worth putting inside it.
Indulge my ’80s nostalgia for a moment. Think of your marketing strategy like Top Gun.
About 95% should be Iceman: disciplined, precise and relentlessly good at the fundamentals.
The other 5% is Maverick. That is where you take calculated risks, push the edge and occasionally discover something that changes the game.
You need both.
But understand the gamble. Very few Maverick ideas will ever earn their way into the box. Most will end up with the same fate as Goose.
RIP.
That is why experimentation should be contained enough that failure teaches you something without putting the core business at risk.
Today’s boring fundamentals may have been somebody’s crazy idea five years ago. The fact that it no longer feels innovative is completely irrelevant.
Proven does not mean outdated.
Thinking outside the box is how you find what comes next.
Thinking inside the box is how you make money while you’re looking.
The Product Must Match the Pitch
Marketing can sell the first stay.
It cannot manufacture the second one.
We can create awareness, sharpen the offer and give someone a compelling reason to choose one hotel over another.
Then they arrive.
That does not mean Marketing’s job is done.
The pitch created an expectation. Marketing should be just as obsessed with whether the hotel delivered it as we were with getting the booking in the first place.
Customer satisfaction, post-stay sentiment and repeat behavior all tell us whether the promise held up once the marketing stopped and the experience started.
And there are parts of that experience Marketing can influence directly.
Pre-arrival communication. Express and keyless check-in. In-room messaging. Every opportunity to remove friction and make the stay feel consistent with what we sold.
But Marketing can only control so much.
Owners, this is where you come in.
The room still has to feel like the room we sold. The amenities have to deliver. The service has to match the expectation. And no matter how talented the staff is, they cannot indefinitely compensate for a physical product that has been allowed to deteriorate.
I am fortunate to be part of a company that understands that. Last year alone, we invested roughly $65 million renovating rooms, updating properties and protecting the experience our marketing promises.
Because the economics of marketing change dramatically when the product stops delivering.
At BRH, roughly 75% of our business comes from repeat guests. We stay connected to that audience, sending roughly 90 million emails a year and maintaining ongoing communication with millions of social followers.
That marketing matters, but only if the guest left wanting to come back. As we all know, it costs roughly 8x more to acquire a new customer.
That is why retention is not just an operations metric. It is a marketing metric too.
The first booking proves the pitch worked.
The second proves the product did.
The Future of AI Search Is Reputation
Everyone outside Marketing, I have some uncomfortable news for you.
Deep breath.
You work in Marketing now.
Every department. Every team member. Everything that influences the guest experience is marketing the hotel.
That idea is not entirely new. What has changed is how much more visible that experience is becoming, and how much more influence it may have over who finds you next.
For years, hotel search was largely transactional.
“Hotels in Miami.”
“Oceanfront hotels in Myrtle Beach.”
“Hotels near Disney.”
Now imagine asking AI:
“What is the best beachfront hotel in Miami for a family with young kids that has a great pool, clean rooms and is actually worth the money?”
That is a very different question.
And “best” is an extremely subjective word. Best according to whom?
AI does not have a favorite hotel. It does not go on vacation. It has no personal experience from which to decide what “best” means.
So it has to infer an answer from the evidence available to it.
Reviews. Ratings. OTAs. Travel sites. Social conversation. Third-party content. The collective reputation the market has built around the hotel.
Suddenly, the guest experience is not just affecting retention.
The guest experience is becoming search data.
That should get everyone’s attention.
Housekeeping, front desk, maintenance and F&B are all creating reputation through the experiences they deliver. HR influences it through the people they hire. Ownership influences it through the product it provides. Technology and automation influence it every time they make the experience easier, faster or less frustrating.
This is where the emerging world of generative engine optimization, or GEO, gets interesting.
SEO is not going away. We will still optimize websites, content, distribution and all the fundamentals that help customers find us.
But AI search introduces something much harder for Marketing to control.
Corroboration.
We can say the rooms are immaculate and our service is exceptional. But the market gets a vote.
Increasingly, AI will have a growing body of evidence to decide whether anyone else agrees.
That is good for travelers. And I believe it will be good for quality hotel operators like BRH.
The hotels that have spent years polishing the pitch while neglecting the product are about to have a much harder problem to solve, because Marketing can shape perception, but it cannot outrun reality.
And in the age of AI travel, Marketing won’t get the final word on your reputation.
Your guests will.
Want to learn how Brittain Resorts & Hotels creates experiences that turn guests into lifelong advocates? Connect with us to explore our guest-centric management approach.