Luxury marketing – it’s easy to make assumptions about the lives of the rich and famous. Luxury marketers continue to value cost over value, things over experiences and service.
For the luxury travel PR professional who is handling a campaign for a product aimed at the very niche and targeted upscale market, the key to success is understanding what trends will resonate with the media who write for this audience.
“Often when people are looking at a luxury product from the outside in, they make assumptions of what will be appealing to the people who can afford it,” says Shari Jones, Chief Marketing Officer of XOJET, quoted in the recent issue of Marketing Land. Jones says what matters most to customer of their private jet charter services is “authenticity, family, and the realities of work travel.
“It’s not about lifestyles of the rich and famous. [It’s about] getting an executive home in time of dinner with her family on a Friday night…or helping to make a road show more effective so you can see more cities in the same number of days.”
It’s Not About Champagne and Caviar
The same is true of a public relations campaign designed to promote luxury travel, whether for business or leisure travelers. It’s easy to assume the cliché products associated with the luxury market will resonate.
But it’s not about a hotel offering a romantic weekend complete with champagne and caviar. For the PR professional, the audience is not the consumer but rather the media. And there is no bigger cliché-adverse audience. Not only have they heard it all before, they are in tune with their audience’s demands and the trends that shape them.
The most successful luxury travel PR programs today will understand what this market really wants. A PR professional needs the savvy of a marketing executive in understanding what matters:
· Services over things
· Time over money
· The personal touch
“Sophisticated clients want a human connection,” says Ms. Jones. “Technology should help facilitate that, not replace it.”
That means the hotel that covets the high-end business traveler delivers both – technology that makes check-in and check-out effortless and has no-fail wifi, but it’s also offering highly targeted niche services that make business easier and facilitates connections to clients and family.
For the upscale business executive traveling abroad, that means delivering on-demand translation services, a concierge who can shop for and wrap gifts for high-level clients, and spa services that come to you.
A busy business executive staying at a luxury property can’t spend two hours in a spa. They need the spa to come to them, for a last-minute massage to ease stress or a manicure to get ready for a presentation.
The marketing plan put in place will employ digital and traditional strategies in advertising, direct marketing, and PR to deliver these messages directly to the niche luxury traveler. Those messages need to be delivered through the public relations program across all media platforms, traditional and digital.
The difference is our message is delivered “in the trenches” one-on-one to journalists, and we get immediate feedback. For your message to capture the journalist’s attention it must be ‘ahead of the curve’ offering new ideas, citing a new trend backed up by marketing data, or a new twist on an old favorite.
It’s the PR professional’s job to not only communicate the services and products offered, but also explain they trend they identify, and how they create meaningful connections with the target market.