Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

General

Flash sales – good or bad idea?

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Together with spa/beauty, travel /travel tourism and restaurants are the top 3 categories both in the number of deals and amount of revenue generated by flash sales.

Discounting is clearly increasingly popular. Customers love it and more and more companies are piling in to catch a bit of the action. Nonetheless Groupon and LivingSocial are still by far the 2 largest players.

But is it good business in the hospitality sector?

I think that question is the most frequently debated subject amongst industry players wherever they gather at the moment.

On the surface there are 2 fronts.

Those that are doing it and therefore have all sorts of sophisticated arguments why they consider it good business. On the other side those that are not doing it because they consider it the worst form of business ever.

What until now has been really hard to evaluate is who is right and who is wrong.

But now the Centre for Hospitality Research at Cornell University has just released a study that tries to answer exactly that question and a few more – this most useful report can be downloaded here

Key findings are:

Generally participating hotels surveyed report moderate success.

The deals do bring in new business. But as to producing repeat business this is too much less extent the case than what hoteliers hope for when arguing for using these promotions.

“One factor often cited to justify offering a flash sale pro- motion, repeat business, did not seem to operate for these respondents.”

Hoteliers who are happiest with the outcome of their deals are also the ones who have managed the total cost of the deal most assertively.

Overall the conclusion seems to be that flash deals can work for you if you are very astute in negotiating the deal with the coupon provider and you find a way to either upsell to these customers when they are there or have a surefire way to convert them into repeat customers.

This is very neatly illustrated by the authors like this

“Evaluating your property on these two dimensions allows you to better frame the value proposition offered by flash deals. If you don’t expect to be able to convert customers from flash sales deals into returning guests, you must carefully manage the margins of any deal you develop and creatively identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling once guests are on property. When you expect high conversions from flash sales customers to returning guests, you could justify the deal as a marketing expense. You should carefully avoid structuring any flash sales that will land you in the lower left quadrant.”

Emerging Marketing Channels in Hospitality:
A Global Study of Internet-Enabled Flash Sales and Private Sales
by Gabriele Piccoli and Chekitan S. Dev – you will find it here

Question:
What are your experiences with Flash sales – are they working/not working for you?

Goals : Hubris or doubt what works best?

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A dash of honest doubt turns out to be not so bad after all.

The coaching gurus all seem to agree. To reach your goal you need to declare it and abracadabra you are already halfway there.

Well, it turns out that they could be wrong.

According to research performed by a group of American scientists last year and document by Daniel Pink there is a significant difference in performance between 2 groups performing the same task and where one group uses what the scientists called declarative self talk ( I can do it) and the other group uses interrogative self talk (Can I do it?).
The self questioning group performs a lot better than the self affirming group.

In Denmark we had an interesting example of this recently.
As the Danish handball team departed for the European Championships they self confidently declared that they were going for gold. They subsequently lost their first few games and in no way looked as if they were going to get anywhere near the finals. The fans at home of course were furious and the players and trainer were all accused of hubris. Subsequently the declarations from the trainer and players took a subtle shift from ”we can do it” to some serious self questioning around ”can we do it?” and ”what would it take to do it?” – and – abracadabra, they brought home the gold medals to everybody’s surprise – including their own I guess.

The research seems to indicate that people who ask questions somehow come from a more humble place and that in turn creates a space to come up with a deeper solution.

For those of us who have been working with action learning for years that does not come as a big surprise….

Net Promoter Score explained

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This is also the core theme of my upcoming book: ” Best in The Bazar – No need to be cheap, if you can be best”
In the book I explain in simple operational terms how you get this right.

Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey’s The Ultimate Question 2.0 is a follow-up to the bestselling book that first helped businesses understand their Net Promoter Score. One question — would you recommend us to a friend? — offered businesses a vital metric that has since been adopted widely by organizations, including GE. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader spoke with Markey about what NPS is, how companies can increase the number of people who promote them and why it is now a system and not just a score.

Retreat to advance!

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Have you some times questioned the value added of doing your training workshop or strategy session off site?

I know I often get the question: Why can’t we do this in our own meeting facilities, that would cost so much less and be much easier for all of us?

The simple answer is often that if we go off site then we will not get distracted and participants will not be tempted to do their normal stuff. But considering the often quite serious costs involved in going off site that does not really explain an adequate return on investment in itself.

A more nuanced answer has to do with the concept of slow learning – a concept that is also key to achieving a much higher ROI on your training efforts

Let me explain.

If we try and map out ways of learning in a simple matrix with slow and fast learning on one axis and formal versus informal learning on the other we get the following picture:

Informal learning is defined by Jay Cross as “Learning which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs” (and all the other stuff we need to cope with life – (my addition)

Formal learning – is scheduled, planed and with a predefined content.

Fast learning is what happens when we try and cram the most information into the shortest possible time frame – either because we are in a hurry or because we want to cut costs.

Slow learning happens when we allow ourselves time to digest. When we have the possibility to reflect on how new information applies to our situation. This deeper learning occurs in a subtle mix of personal reflection and discussion with others.

There is – in a way – the same nutritional relationship between slow- and fast learning as theres is between slow- and fast food.

The big difference between fast and slow learning becomes evident once the session is over. Fast learning seldom sticks – it is often called teflon training – guaranteed not to stick – there is no or very little implementation afterwards. Participants may have added tools to their kit but they continue to use the hammer they always used. And what ever growth there is, is horizontal – they know more stuff.

Slow learning on the other hand produces visible shifts in behavior – the changes occur not so much as a result of understanding new skills but in the way participant are able to take new perspectives.They see things in new ways and reach their own conclusions as to what needs to be done. This is vertical growth – looking at challenges from a different level than the one they where created at – and the result is deep change.

If you truly wish to advance rapidly you need to retreat…

As the complexity increases… the medium is the problem

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Nielsen Media: even on cellphones, voice spending has been trending downward, with text spending expected to surpass it within three years.

Think about it. Marshall McLuhan noted that the more complex the message the more complex the media you need to use in order to convey that message.
The simplest media form we have is txt messaging ( the most complex is of course f2f ). So here we are in a world of ever rising complexity, trending to ever more simplistic communication forms – no wonder it gets harder and harder to work out solutions.