Recently I was trying to buy a ticket online on Tiger Airways, a budget airline that operates out of Singapore and serves Asia.  Though I knew about Tiger, I’ve never flown it.  So I did 2 searches, one on Google, and one on Twitter, both using the keywords “tiger airways.”  Here’s what I found: Google’s first search result page returned 10 results, 6 led to a booking engine, 4 to information (including wikipedia).  Twitter returned 20 results, 0 led to a booking engine, 4 tweets were positive, 3 were neutral, 2 were questions, and a whopping 11 were negative (for math lovers that’s a -35% net favorability if you consider questions to be neutral).  Below are screenshots of the top 5 results from each service (click the image to zoom in).

google v. twitter results for tiger airways, July 2009

As you can see, while Google does a sufficient job at presenting facts, Twitter is much more human with personal pet peeves for all to see.  Also, I had no idea how old the sites Google pointed me to were, but I had a pretty good idea that the tweets about Tiger were all very recent, and therefore, more relevant to me.  Finally, Google abstracts are often an incomplete description of the website, whereas Twitter posts are mostly complete thoughts.  This slight difference is the pivotal one as it relates to brands.  In this example, whereas Google invites travelers to find out more, Twitter users unabashedly present their point of view so travelers don’t have to find out more.

For a traveler deciding, let’s say, between Tiger and Air Asia (another low cost carrier), you don’t have to read a lot of tweets to quickly form an opinion for how they’re regarded by their customers.  As the tweets predicted, I encountered a problem buying my ticket on Tiger’s website, and was instructed to call customer service.  While on hold, I was reminded at least 5 times that Tiger won the Best Low-Cost Airline of the Year in 2008 from CAPA within the on-hold loop music, which ironically made me question the validity of the award.

Why?  Not because I don’t respect CAPA, but because the tweeters’ complaints were entire consistent with each other and with my booking and customer service experience.  Some were further backed by links to news reports that reported on similar incidences.  On the other hand, I had absolutely no idea who at CAPA selected the airline and under what criteria.  The tweets I read made the professional CAPA opinion and award seemingly obsolete and dated, and the award did not lessen my growing doubts about Tiger Airways.

Is my brand experience typical?  I think more and more so.  A brand’s story becomes fragmented when there’s dissonance between what it tries to portray vs. the actual customer feedback.  That “promise gap” can shred a brand and render its messaging useless if the feedback is antithetical to the brand portrayal, and the brand either ignores the feedback or insists that the opposing feedback came from outliers.  In the past, customer feedback have been exclusively behind the brand’s firewall or embedded in private conversations and emails.  Message forums led to review sites led to blogging, each made customer feedback more public.  Twitter is all of those combined, with rocket boosters, and equipped with efficient search internally and to be externally discovered (via Google).

While consumers may initially approach Twitter with high skepticism, if they consistently read tweets that mirror their own experiences, they’ll start to accept and believe in the wisdom of the tweeters.  This is why the “follow” function is so powerful.  On Twitter, you can follow anyone you trust, and stop following anyone who gives bs, which is unlike Facebook where the person you want to friend (in order to see what they have to say) has to accept your friend request.

Given the rapid growth of Twitter, learning from travelers who are otherwise inaccessible to you but who happen to know what you need will become even more pervasive in the coming days.  The operative word here being days.  Where else in the world can a traveler go to find the right micro-segment of travelers who have the exact relevant, current, and credible knowledge they need?  Not travel agencies, not brands, not travel books, not travel magazines, not CAPA, and I posit, not even their friends and family.  This, coupled with the speed and reach of Twitter discussed in part 1, are the key ingredients to a paradigm shift for brands in the travel industry.

If you want more context about why Twitter works, you can read Granovetter’s seminal work on the Strength of Weak Ties.  For a non-academic version, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point covers the main idea as well.  From Wikipedia, the central premise is,

In marketing or politics, the weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties.

That, is exactly what Twitter does with amazing efficiency.

If you’re in the travel industry, or are a traveler, you can not ignore Twitter.

On the surface, Twitter may not be impressive.  You tweet (or broadcast, for the non-Twitteratis) what you want in 140 characters or less.  People who follow you receive your tweet instantly.  You can follow people whose tweets you like.  People who like your tweets can follow you.  You can do a keyword search on all the tweets.  If so inclined, you can re-tweet (RT) someone else’s tweet that you found to be particularly useful (it’s the Twitter version of email forward).  You can also embed a tag with a # in front of the tag name to denote important topics that you think (or hope) other people will follow.  For example #iranelections (vs. a keyword search on “iran elections“) or #followfriday, whose trend was analyzed by Mashable.

Twitter also has a direct message capability which is just like private messaging, but it’s really not the reason you use the service.  When I first began using Twitter, I got the feeling that the service was making public my tweets (which were like SMS or Facebook status).  But it turns out what ingenious Twitter users can do with 140 characters has made Twitter really an incredibly useful tool.

With an URL shortening service like bit.ly, which is very popular among Twitteratis, 140 characters is more than enough to express one’s brief opinion about a web page (very often, blogs).  There’s a further element of mystery added the the tweet because a typical shortened URL does not contain the web site name per se, it’s more like http://bit.ly/188bbf or http://bit.ly/12QgiZ, so the click-through rests solely on the credibility of the tweeter and the copy they used to describe the link.  Yes I used the word “copy” because I believe the tweeter is trying to recommend or sell the link to compel a click-through.  Combined that with the ability to RT, Twitter can have a profound impact quickly and virally.

Recently, an esteemed hotel chain posted agency-made videos that were meant to be viral to promote itself.  The videos were viral, but in an unintentionally negative way.  Within hours both bloggers and tweeters denounced them and the brand.  The combined forces, bloggers tweeting and tweeters retweeting with escalating commentaries quickly spread the bad idea, the impact so great that the chain pulled the videos down within 24 hours and issued an apology.

Also celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton, was assaulted recently in Toronto.  When police did not respond in a timely manner, Hilton tweeted an SOS to his over 1M followers, a good number of whom inundated the police department with calls.  When the police finally arrived Hilton had to tweet out another request asking his followers to stop calling on his behalf.

Those response times are considered to be slow.  Both the NY Times and MSNBC recently published articles about travelers receiving attention via Twitter.  In the case of the NY Times, here’s an excerpt:

Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn’t seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: “@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight.”

Exactly 19 minutes later, JetBlue tweeted back, suggesting they correspond privately, using Twitter’s “direct message” feature: “@tonywagner Please follow us so we may DM!” After a brief exchange, JetBlue flagged his tickets as a priority concern.

And from Chris Elliott of MSNBC Travel:

“Dear Virgin Air,” she wrote. “My children have been on the tarmac for one hour with 90 more minutes to wait. I am at JFK gate b25. Pls RT.” That last request — please “RT” — is shorthand for Gottlieb’s nearly 10,000 followers to “retweet” her message, or rebroadcast it to their followers. And retweet they did. Within minutes, Virgin had phoned Gottlieb to reassure her that her kids would be fine.

“They contacted the gate agent manager and explained to us the entire weather situation,” she says. “Within 20 minutes of that conversation, the plane took off.”

Chris is a tweeter I follow.  He tweeted his article and to see RT in action, you can see how many tweeters have since retweeted his article to tell other travelers how they can use Twitter to improve their travel experience.

So if travelers are using Twitter and also being coached on how to use it (in Chris’ article he recommends 6 ways in which travelers can use social media services like Twitter to improve their travel experience), what are you doing to meet your customers on Twitter?

Like swing voters, swing travelers could hold the key to your hotel beating this economy.

Most hoteliers’ performance is measured not only by absolute revenue, but also market share.  Swing travelers can make all the difference in market share.

Let me use a simple example to illustrate the importance of swing travelers.  Let’s say there are 10 travelers making a reservation today and 2 hotels in your city, yours and your competitor’s, and normally you’d get 5 travelers each.  That means you and your competitor each have 50% market share.

If your hotel wins 1 traveler from the other hotel, then your market share would be 60% and your competitor at 40%.  That’s a 20% difference in your favor.  Now let’s calculate RevPAR.  Assume that both hotels have 10 rooms, all travelers stay 1 night, and the ADR for is $100/night.  Your hotel would achieve a $60 RevPAR vs. your competitor’s $40 RevPAR.  In fact, for your competitor to achieve the same RevPAR as you they would have to increase their ADR by 50% — to $150/night to achieve the same RevPAR as yours just to make up for the loss of 1 swing traveler.

Now, let’s suppose that your competitor manages to attract 1 new customer to the market, the market share would be 6/11 vs. 5/11, which is 55% vs. 45% in your favor.  To achieve the same RevPAR as you they’d still have to raise their ADR to $120/night vs. your $100/night.  In fact, your competitor would have to attract 3 new customers to the 1 that you swung over originally to win market share back.  In other words, in this simple example your competitor would have to grow the market by 30% (increase the number of travelers from 10 to 13) as a result of 1 swing traveler, in order to win against your hotel.

No wonder brands like Holiday Inn and Hyatt are not slowing down to win share despite the downturn.

How many swing travelers are there?  According to loyalty research and consulting firm, Colloquy, the total number of memberships from US travelers in hotel loyalty programs increased 26% to 161.9M memberships from 2007 to 2008.  This increase happened despite a sharp drop in demand in the second half of 2008.  While I believe first-ever loyalty memberships might account for some of that increase, the remainder comes from travelers that registered for their 2nd, 3rd… nth membership, making them swing travelers.  And remember, this is just amongst the segment already considered to be most loyal.

Carroll Rheem, Director of Research at PhoCusWright, recently said,

“The era of transparency ushered in by the Internet evangelizes faith in content, not faith in brands.  Companies need to understand the Long Tail of travelers and how its disloyal constituents make decisions: they don’t care about miles or points, can easily find another flight and don’t need a hotel flag to tell them what their experience is going to be like.”

Swing travelers are looking for stay experiences that fit their personal needs.  Because most hotels are using pricing as a strategy, impressive discounts are now the norm, not the exception.  What swing travelers are looking for then are the differentiators that give them the value they seek within a comparable price range.  Do you know what your differentiators are and are you communicating them loudly and clearly where travelers are researching where to stay?

Just for fun, I pretended to be a swing traveler looking for “hotels san francisco” on Google to see the ads that come up from hotel suppliers (I excluded the OTAs because they all uniformly tout discounts).  Removing identifiable info, below is the text of the first 8 hotelier ads I found:

1. There’s more to enjoy! Book unique offer. Instant Service 800-XXX-XXXX
2. Official Site. Book Now for Great Rates & Our Exclusive Packages!
3. Official Site. [brand name] San Francisco Hotel. Book Online.
4. Stay at [brand name] in San Francisco. Best rates online. Book online now!
5. Boutique [brand name] Hotel in Downtown San Francisco. Book online now!
6. Book a luxury hotel in the heart of San Francisco & enjoy access to all
7. Why pay high prices downtown? Free hot breakfast & airport shuttle!
8. San Francisco. Great locations. Free internet & breakfast bar.

What’s remarkable to me is that half of them (1-4) are virtually indistinguishable because they don’t offer anything meaningful other than to let the consumer know they can book online.  But the fact is these ads come from 3 different hotel suppliers (2 and 3 are different brands from the same hotel management company).  The other half offers some differentiation, but boutique and luxury are much less specific than free breakfast, free internet, and free airport shuttle.  Incidentally, 7 & 8 are actually from the same brand, 7 is an individual property where 8 is the brand ad.

I don’t think swing travelers would be convinced by the non-specific ads.  The way consumers think about the total price isn’t just the room, but all the costs associated with a stay.  Breakfast, internet, and transportation all make the value greater because it means less additional money out of a traveler’s pocket.  In recognizing their short attention span, those ads clearly communicate the differentiations that really matter in a direct and concrete way.

A swing traveler would almost always follow-up by reading reviews about the quality of the breakfast, the speed and reliability of the internet, and the timeliness of the airport shuttle.  Hence communicating the differentiations is only half of it, hoteliers need to make sure they’re backed up by solid reviews from previous guests.  Or alternatively, communicate in these ads what their guests have already complimented them on.

We’ve looked at one channel to win the swing traveler’s attention, and hopefully, their business.  But there are other ways.  The biggest paradigm shift that hoteliers must undergo is to market to and win the swing travelers one at a time by focusing on their specific needs.  Massive blocks of reservations and contracts with corporate clients, both fundamental business drivers in the past, are becoming increasingly rare and don’t deliver like they used to.  Like the swing voters that determined many elections in the past… swing travelers will be the group that determines who wins in many markets.

I was on a panel with Karthik Siva at the Asia Luxury Travel Market in Shanghai where we discussed traditional vs. “new wave” branding.  Karthik is the visionary behind Global Brand Forum.  The panel was moderated by Siew Hoon Yeoh of Web-in-Travel (aka WIT), the conference where we launched Brand Karma last year.  Though he represented traditional marketing and I represented “new wave,” I found much in common with his thinking.

One such common perspective revolves around the purpose of a brand and its importance today.  Luxury brands have long understood the need to define a unique purpose and have been fulfilling it by manifesting features to not only justify their price point, but also to retain customers.

But what about non-luxury brands?  Does price trump all?

I don’t think so.  Some of the businesses that have filed for bankruptcy actually used price as a key differentiator (e.g. Mervyns) or resorted to using price as a tool to stimulate volume (e.g. General Motors, Eddie Bauer).

Hoteliers around the world are dropping prices.  At the same time, in the eyes of travelers, hotel stay experiences have become more generic.  I hear a lot more statements like “I can’t tell the differences between these hotels,” and “the rooms are all pretty much the same.”  I also see it on the trend graphs in Brand Karma.  If customers don’t feel passion for their product, hoteliers may have to use pricing as the strategy because it typically has an immediate impact of driving volume… at least for a while.  But that’s not sustainable in the long run.  Both General Motors and Eddie Bauer created products that customers didn’t want to buy… eventually even lower prices didn’t work because both brands failed to inspire or stand for something that consumers cared to spend any money on.

Hence hoteliers, if you haven’t already done so, now might be a good time to do a quick check up on your brand purpose.  You don’t need to hire a consultant to do this.  Just answer these questions honestly:

1. Why does your brand exist?
2. How is that relevant today?
3. What are you and your staff doing to deliver on the brand promise?
4. How is what you’re doing different from what your competitors are doing?
5. Would your customers agree with your answers?

The answer to question 5 is critical, and the impact of a “no” or “I don’t know” could be devastating.  Check out AT&T’s change in its upgrade policy for the iPhone and also the site about consumer credit card rules for a sense of how things could evolve.

As a starting point, take a look at what’s been publicly expressed about your brand.  This will give you a pretty good idea, whether you agree or not, at how your guests really felt about their stay experiences.  Because their reviews are public, their words also shape potential customers’ impression of your brand when they research your brand — which has a direct impact on whether consumers book a room at your property or not.

Finally, even when not reviewing your brand, users express strong opinions about what ought to happen, echoing general consumer sentiments or raising expectations.  This may have a significant impact on the relevance of your offering.  For example, Gary Arndt recently tweeted something I’m sure many travelers think of:

• “So many places say they have ‘internet’ but do not mention if it is free or if it is just a computer in a common area”
• “I know free wifi is becoming the deal breaker for me and a lot of other people. Hotels should take note”

How influential will people like Gary Arndt be?  His tweet currently reaches over 72,000 followers.

Bing is exciting because Microsoft did a good job in integrating various pieces of technology across the company to create a great value proposition for consumers — namely moving search results away from web pages that might contain answers to the actual answers themselves.  This is no easy feat and when you consider that they created Bing by integrating technologies from across their internal groups as well as companies that had been acquired (e.g. Farecast, Powerset), the achievement is even more astonishing.  As an ex-Microsoft guy, I really hope they pull it off, and it seems like there’s momentum behind them with a lot of initial positive reviews.

If the launch hype translates into repeat users, Bing will change the travel landscape yet again in the next 12 months.  The OTAs and meta-searches will have to deal with a new breed of mashups following the trail of Bing that not only looks for the best price but also, the best personal fit.  These types of “decision engine” or “recommendation” services have existed in the past, but Bing has legitimized the approach.  Many startups in this space probably just got a call from their investors with renewed interest.  Some people may see Bing as a natural evolution of meta-searches, but if it’s job isn’t to present you with the most number of options, but the least number of best options, then I think it warrant its own category.

As an early Bing user, I got the promise but was not blown over by the execution.  Microsoft has the right idea and an opportunity to be relevant in search, so I hope they don’t screw it up by over-promising and under-delivering.  I worry because Bing has a lot of exposures in the press and through advertising, but it still delivers imperfect results a lot of times.  Also, I personally stopped following Bing on Twitter 2 days ago because I was being over-tweeted.  Nonetheless, there is general goodwill towards Bing, and I believe that the value proposition is different enough that people will give Bing a chance to iron out its kinks.

Finally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bing compels Google and Yahoo to aggresively look for acquisitions and/or accelerate their mobile offerings in travel if Bing lives up to its hype.

Last week a well-respected hotel chain stumbled in creating viral videos that were insensitive instead of funny.  Enough’s been said about that so let’s move on to something more positive.

Gillette’s new campaign surrounding the idea of “manscaping” is funny and effective. In research they found that 1 in 3 men shaved parts of body other than their face, and before they ran the campaign they tested the videos for with both men and women to ensure that they wouldn’t be offended.  The videos have a cartoon character teaching you how to shave different regions of the body.  The result is a viral video home run, of which the most popular in the series has already garnered over 600,000 views in 2 weeks.  You can probably guess which region that particular self-help focuses on.

The campaign is clever and brilliantly help Gillette establish their brand with younger males at the time when Gillette is expanding its product line beyond shaving to personal hygiene.  By using YouTube, Gillette is where these consumers are.  To draw them to Gillette, it focused the content of the video on something younger males would relate to (when you factor in age, I’d bet younger men shave other body parts more than older men, so the figure is likely more than 1 in 3 younger men could relate to the videos).  Finally, by making them short and funny, Gillette enabled the early discoverers to then spread word of the video through their social networking channels such as Twitter and blogs.

It’ll be interesting in the following days to see how the humor of manscaping translates across cultures.

Circos is hiring software engineers in Singapore and we invite qualified graduates to apply.  We’re looking for smart technical students who can think out of the box.  If you make it, you’ll work with a team of talented developers building innovative technologies to make the web even more useful than it already is.

Email your resume to: career.sg@circos.com.  You can check out what we’re hiring for at http://www.circos.com/careers/

I want to spend a little bit of time explaining the type of software engineer we’re seeking.  To succeed at Circos as an SE, you need to have strong CS fundamentals and excel in writing code.  The interviews that you will go through will primarily test your technical aptitude.  To help you prepare, here are 5 tips:

1. Know your fundamentals!
2. Be prepared to prove your “expertise,” in other words, don’t BS about what you know.
3. Don’t expect to know the answer to every question.
4. Knowing the right answer but not being able to explain how you got the answer is worse than not getting the right answer.
5. Listen to the question and understand what we’re asking before attempting to solve it.

We recently just considered over 100 students who applied to work at Circos and did not make a single offer because everyone who had applied encountered problems in one or more of the areas above, with the great majority not advancing because they failed the “knowing the fundamentals” test.

We understand that personality and fit is important, but at Circos we want to make sure that you’ve got the right level of technical aptitude before we consider personality and fit.

A final word of advice (and for interviewing with any company): arrive on time, leave your cellphone at home or on silent, and be professionally presentable.

From time to time I get asked to cite examples of a brand that does a great job of leveraging Web 2.0 to enhance its brand story.  With the ease in which anyone can post something about their brand experience, its easy for brand stories to get fragmented.  Recently the impact of social media on Domino’s pizza, as well as the instant fame that Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent, are examples of how influential social media has become.  Susan Boyle’s video on YouTube has been viewed more than 51M times — which has not only established her as an overnight brand but also cemented the show (and people like Simon Cowell) as the de facto talent discoverer worldwide.

The examples above are accidental in that something extraordinary happened and the parties were accidental victims or benefactors of the ensuing buzz.  But what about a brand that has actively embraced Web 2.0 as part of its strategy?  A few months ago I saw the t-mobile commercial that featured a dance in Liverpool station in London.  That video has been viewed more than 11M times and generated a lot of buzz for the brand to make it fresh.  T-mobile just followed up on April 30th with a live singing at Trafalgar Square.

The video itself undoubtedly will be as viral as the first commercial, but its the user-generated content from the event itself that will not only further the buzz but increase the specificity through which t-mobile’s brand stories can be “narrowcasted” by the participants to achieve even further impact.  For example, when I searched for “t-mobile trafalgar” on Flickr I found over 300 results, and there are already over 150 results on YouTube.

The “Life is for Sharing” campaign is right for t-mobile because the inherent nature of what t-mobile does is to connect people together so they can share — hence the tagline isn’t a stretch.  But the campaign they’re running to leverage Web 2.0 makes the sharing real.  By creating these singing and dancing events t-mobile also created a platform for participants and passerbys to experience something extraordinary, and the very devices and services they use to tell their friends and family can all be easily linked back to what t-mobile has to provide.

In a brilliant twist of “in-the-know,” the singer Pink is also in the Trafalgar video.  Her brief “just one of the crowd” presence, in addition to the perfect product placements of participants taking pictures/videos using their cellphones while the event is going on goes to show how well t-mobile and its ad agency understand how to leverage Web 2.0 to enhance its brand story.

Similar to the participants of Trafalgar and Liverpool, hoteliers should expect their guests to share their (hopefully extraordinary) stay experience.  Some will do this in text, others will further enhance with pictures and videos.  Each new post will either contribute to or detract from the brand story.  It’s unwise to ignore what these customers are saying, as unlike guest satisfaction surveys which can be seen only by the hotel staff, these posts are publicly available to anyone.  At a minimum, all hoteliers need to be aware of what is being said.

For hoteliers who have a communicative customer base, a business strategy that incorporates Web 2.0 and social media as part of the brandstorytelling will lead the brand to have better awareness, favorability, loyalty, and ultimately, profitability.

Incidentally, I will be speaking about this topic at the China Travel Innovation Summit, an event that is sponsored by China Travel Daily in association with PhoCusWright.  Hope to see you there.

PhoCusWright just released their top 10 trends for travel technology for 2009-2010 and I couldn’t agree more with what they said about Business Analytics and Intelligence becoming more important in the current economy.  We’ve heard many people who have expressed similar sentiments, particularly as the expected ROI on marketing dollars gets closely scrutinized.

Brand Karma is a business analytic tool for social media.  Social media’s true impact on a brand’s bottom-line must be understood for businesses to remain current, credible, and relevant.  Much of the data warehouses that have been built over the years focus on transactional business data — i.e. how has your business performed after sales.  But what about why?

How your brand is perceived in social media will increasingly hold important answers as to why your business is performing a certain way as more people rely on social media to inform their purchases.  Hence brands that understand the linkage between its performance and its perception will understand the true purchase drivers, and can therefore be very focused in aligning their organization to deliver superior value on those drivers.

For a look at the industries whose consumers are researching social media prior to making a purchase worldwide, you can check out this report from Universal McCann.

Which would you choose?

I think most of you would select Kleenex if it were the same price as the grocery store generic.

And in that question lies the importance of brand equity in these times.  As more and more hoteliers drop rate to sustain volume, some of the sacrifices that they make come at the expense of upholding their brand promise.  The problem with this is that while the price tactic might drive volume in the short term, it may not necessarily increase the number of loyal customers if the sacrifices comes in the form of service or other features that has been associated with the brand.

Hoteliers have wonderful opportunities when deploying price cutting campaigns to win customers.  Their focus shouldn’t be just on driving volume, but attracting and developing loyal customers.  In a contracting market, to maintain the same volume the customers must come from somewhere else (e.g. your competitors).  Therefore, if you reduce price to increase volume, a portion of those customers will be new ones that came from your competitors as a result of your lower price.  What will you do to get them to come back a 2nd time … nth time in the future… and at a higher price point?

The answer lies in what is the brand promise you present when these customers come in through your doors.  You must love them to win them.  Brands that do not compromise on their brand promise in these times have the opportunity to win new loyal customers if they take the loyalty factor into account when planning their campaigns.  Just focusing on volume and not loyalty is short-sighted; this tactic makes the numbers now, but when the market recovers what the customers associate with your brand is just low price, i.e. just as it’s hard to make people pay (the good-time) Kleenex prices for generics, it will be hard for people to pay a higher price for a hotel that has lost its brand promise.

With social media and user generated content having persistence and being publicly accessible, compromises in brand promise experienced by customers will be documented and become part of the brand story –and brand marketers will have a difficult time regaining control over the story.