Tablet Hotels was losing ground. In 2018, Booking.com, the largest player in the online travel agent industry, launched Genius Rates which essentially undercut the rates Tablet was offering by 5-10%. At the same time, Hotel Tonight, a premium last-minute hotel reservations app had launched its first website, greatly expanding its reach. Tablet had always done well from word-of-mouth referrals amongst the creative class and the occasional clever one-off tactic from the lean team, but with this increased competition, increasing media costs, decreasing ad performance, and declining membership in its VIP program, Tablet was counting on the Michelin acquisition to be able to invest in a real marketing plan to reverse the negative trend.

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I joined in May 2019, and set about on a 90-day marketing strategy development process:

• Benchmarking activity, performance and trends

• Understanding current brand perception and competitive differentiators

• Sizing the market opportunity and profiling the target audience

• Exploring category dynamics, developing budgets and forecasting performance

 

My 3 key inputs: questions added to a planned survey among current users asking what they liked/disliked about travel/Tablet, a workshop I conducted with senior members of the team to develop 3 positioning territories, and a quant study I ran in the US and UK (N=921) to test the territories and analyze brand awareness, preference, and the persuadable target size and profile.

 

From this, I built the marketing strategy and budget for Michelin’s review in September which was approval by late October. I then RPFed several creative and media agencies, and briefed the chosen ones to bring the positioning to life and connect with prospects across 4 key phases of the travel journey. The $8M campaign (2X previous budgets) was scheduled to launch in March 2020 in 8 languages.

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Instead, the campaign’s start was delayed 6+ months and rolled out in micro-phases, shifting spend around lockdown markets. In anticipation of the travel recovery, our team adopted the new positioning and branded visuals to update editorial, product, sales and partnership strategies, web, app, email and social look & feel, recruiting materials, office decor, merchandise, and more.

 

Once fully launched, the new campaign’s ROAS was more than double vs prior efforts, allowing Tablet to generate the same booking value with half the media investment.