The Challenges
Destination Management Organizations, DMOs, the marketing arm for cities, regions, states, and countries are consistently challenged to stand out amongst a myriad of choices for leisure and business travelers. DMOs seek to capture the three drivers of human behavior – desire, emotion, and knowledge – that will lead the visitor to select their destination for future travel. To assess the decision-making hierarchy of their consumers, they have traditionally used polls, surveys, focus groups, forums, and A/B testing. These expensive, time-consuming, methodologies reflect individual preferences at the time of the question, but do not measure one’s conviction to the answer, nor does it analyze the effect of social influence to predict how participants might be influenced by the thoughts and opinions of others. DMOs need not only identify their potential audience, but they also need to understand how to market to them by understanding what their sociographics and geographic motivators are in order to develop resonant messaging.
The Solutions
At Parker Sanpei, we are constantly researching new technology and methodologies that can provide deeper situational insights and analysis for our clients. Hence Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Sessions were adopted to tap into the attitudes, motivators, preferences and criteria consumers unconsciously hold dear when making decisions in every aspect of their lives, including travel. Parker Sanpei conducted a Swarm Session with leisure travelers across the country who anonymously came onto the Swarm platform to answer questions regarding what motivates them to travel to any given location over another.
Lessons from the Swarm
Through the Swarm’s proprietary analysis in the background, we were able to determine the most influential marketing tactics, preferred travel methods, desired attractions, what would inspire longer stays, and much more. Because of the findings through Swarm Intelligence, and the ability to provide highly accurate insights and forecasts, Parker Sanpei was invited to introduce our findings at the annual DMA West conference. Parker Sanpei’s own public relations success is a template for our clients. As part of any demand generation strategy we recommend being recognized in your industry as a thought leader. Thought leadership content has become a cornerstone for attracting the attention of relevant press and partners, but also to instill trust in potential customers. The quick-hit data from Swarm Studies are natively formatted as charts, graphs and even animated GIFs perfect for infographics used, among other ways, for professional social media outreach. And the huge amount of useful information that comes from a single one-hour session is easily distilled into useful tidbits of insights to help raise the relevance and engagement of your email, marketing and advertising campaigns.
