158 - Marketing Academics

Keeping up with all the AI news is a full time job. Finding ROI in AI implementations is still fuzzy (I’m old enough to remember when we used to ask that about Social Media). There is no doubt about the potential, but let’s be concrete about it - still nobody changed the world by being concrete. Have a great read (rant warning in the column).

Best, Martin

Pragmatik marketing agency turns hospitality SaaS
companies into highly visible market leaders.
Find out more ➛

Sadio Mané turning a historic building in tier 2 city, Bourges into a luxury hotel is a great example of celebrity capital supporting secondary destinations. The project could bring attention to a city that is not usually on the global luxury travel map. Could projects like this be like this distribute travel better?

DESTINATION DEVELOPMENT

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, a tech marketing agency that's all about results. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. 

Subconscious signals in hotel experiences are interesting because they are probably things great GMs already feel instinctively. Entrance rug, smell, sound, temperature, dust. Hospitality quality is often visible before it is measurable.

HOTEL SIGNALS⁺

The Louis Vuitton hotel on the Champs-Élysées will apparently not happen. I’ve argued before that it would be a huge risk for the brand. Hotel brands behave totally different from consumer goods. Maintaining experience and quality isn’t just a question of factory quality control. Time makes hotels worse. People are different etc. But LVMH CEO is also notorious for making big statements, so let’s see how this goes.

LV HOTEL



Marriott building a model-agnostic AI chassis while keeping guest data off outside models is interesting. But it really reminds me of the data-lake concept that many have been speaking about for a while. We honestly don’t know what AI is really going to bring, I think it will be incremental not watershed. But we know for sure that a solid data infrastructure will be the backbone.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE

L’Hôtel de Crillon hosted Rosewood Academy around leadership in the age of AI. I’m sure others are too. I’d love to get some of the insights of what they found. They’re the ones doing the real hotel work. We get carried away with agentic ai and all kinds of buzzwords - but what is actually working?

AI LEADERSHIP

The idea that fintech apps could become OTAs is interesting (but more likely they’ll be a reseller). But they own payments, identity, trust and frequent app usage. It’s the super-app discussion all over again. In that case they could do e-commerce too. We’re back to where do current OTAs fit in the future?

FINTECH OTAS

With AI designing more and more, we’re entering what iF Design Report aptly calls the age of average. The recent Ferrari EV reveal was not necessarily bad as the internet made it out to be. But it was very average in terms of design. It looks like many other cars on the market. The slew of new websites with their elongated serif fonts and ASCII art are super cool. But they’re already average. Hotels have been in the Age of Average for some time now. As some joked, just replace the curtain colors and it could be a Marriot, a Hilton, a Crowne Plaza or any other brand. Even between luxury and mid-scale hotel guests don’t see the difference. I guess it is in the details we can’t see.

AGE OF AVERAGE UN-COURAGEOUS ROOMS

Tom Michelberger’s work is a reminder that hospitality is not only design, but atmosphere, people and community. Beautiful spaces can still feel empty. We all know this. But it’s always great to hear from people who actually did it right, not just the pundits.

REAL HOSPITALITY

Hotels.com’s “Hotel Hopping” trend is interesting. Guests are apparently doing multiple hotels for a same trip. Based on location, concept and specific experiences. Now’s a really good time to review your USP and make sure it is not everything-for-everyone.

HOTEL HOPPING

Google says travel queries in AI Mode have tripled in length, which makes sense. Think about it “hotel paris marais” is not how we think. For hotels, this means old keyword strategies are not enough; content has to answer more specific, conversational needs. It is less about ranking for “hotel Paris st germain” and more about being the right answer to “I’m looking for a hotel in paris that is near the louvre, but not on a main road, that has AC because I heard AC is forbidden in Europe, and with a good breakfast and under $300 a night on the 7th August for 1 week” (that was short)

TRAVEL SEARCH

Google putting hotel booking next to products like shoes and groceries is a huge conceptual shift. Travel is being treated less like a separate vertical and more like another commerce category. Not sure how this will work. How long will it lock the inventory? But they’re smart, they’ve tried a thing or two in the space. Curious how this changes things, but in the end Google sells clicks not trips.

GOOGLE COMMERCE

Opinion

I recently read an article claiming that two-thirds of American marketers would fail a basic marketing test. But after looking at some of the questions, I couldn’t help wondering whether the problem isn’t the marketers. Maybe the problem is the test itself.

Many of the questions were essentially vocabulary tests and academic framework tests. Don’t get me wrong, terminology is very important (I co-founded a dictionary for that reason). But let’s not pretend that knowing the correct definition of positioning is the same thing as knowing how to do positioning.

I’ve met marketers who could probably pass the test but their main skill was terminology (and budget submissions). I’ve also met people who couldn’t explain half the terminology but consistently built brands, generated leads, and drove real revenue. Which one is the marketer?

The author is a prominent marketing professor who sells a marketing course. Unsurprisingly, the conclusion appears to be that marketers need more formal education. I may be biased here because I’ve interacted with him before. Years ago I asked which of his courses would help my team become better marketers. I was very direct that I wasn’t looking for fluffy theory. I wanted a practical course. His response was that none of the courses would help me achieve that. At least it was candid.

Marketing is one of those disciplines where formal education can help, a little, not a lot. David Ogilvy had no formal education. Neither did Bill Bernbach. And Steve Jobs was arguably a brilliant marketer too. Education wasn’t what made them legends. They became legends because they understood communication, people, attention. And most importantly, they understood how to make people care.

Marketing itself can’t seem to agree on many of these definitions. Take positioning, April Dunford has a definition, Al Ries has a totally different one. None of them are wrong, one just needs to understand the context. So when somebody says a marketer failed because they picked the wrong definition, it’s a little frustrating.

I’m not defending incompetence, there are absolutely terrible marketers out there, I’ve met many. “I got 3 TikTok posts go viral” now consider themselves a growth expert. Some marketers have never looked at a profit-and-loss statement in their lives. The profession certainly has its share incompetent people. But if they want to learn, I recommend spending a year doing in-person sales. Not memorizing definitions.

Would you say a hotel GM isn’t a good one because they can’t define goppar? Or would you judge them on their ability to manage the constant unpredictable problems of running a hotel and having happy guests?

Luckily some people still value competence above theory. That’s the test that matters.

Did you know: The word “professor” comes from the Latin word “professus,” meaning “having declared publicly.” It originally referred to someone who has declared their knowledge, especially a teacher. Over time, it came to mean a high-ranking teacher at a university or college. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺

⁺ Note, articles that are published by companies or people I work with are tagged with the ⁺ symbol or Partner word. I’m adding this as a transparency. Previously I avoiding sharing content from partners to remain objective, but sometimes they have excellent articles that deserves being shared so to remain transparent, I’ll tag them.