Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

…lots and lots of cobblestones… I just got back from a two-week cruise through Europe, from Budapest to Amsterdam, Danube to Main to Rhein rivers (stay with me here, I’m talking about target marketing.) It was a terrific break from real life, the ship service crew tried hard (lots more about this, good, bad and ugly in posts to come) and my friend and I managed to find things off the daily schedule and beaten path…and so I come to my point.

Viking River Cruises seems to think they’re selling floating hotel rooms and three squares a day (with a fancy luggage tag thrown in for a touch of class.) They’re wrong; they’re really selling an experience, and even within a target demographic there are many different potential customer experiences. In this case, their target demographic is “white American middle- to upper-middle class couples, average age 65+.” They’ve made some broad assumptions including: a. The customers aren’t interested in any real detail behind what they’re seeing; b. the women all want to shop more than tour a museum; and c. the women are with men who put up with the shopping. So, where does this leave two extremely single white women (one 71, one 49) who love history and museums? Well, we did our best with the perfunctory info provided at each stop, the data we’d printed out on each city and our own two feet (“Well, according to the map, the ATM should be on this corner…and what’s that huge interesting pile of stone over there?”)

The tours were designed for moving as many herds as quickly and easily as possible through as many “important” sites/sights as possible. (By the end of day four I was resisting the urge to moo.) My friend and I had two choices: 1. Be herded and talked at; 2. Figure it all out pretty much on our own. Nothing in between. The cruise staff told us to ask questions…and then didn’t know the answers (this from people who do the same exact route at least 12 times a year).

In experience marketing (which is really all marketing) we must remember two things:

1. Targets are living, breathing people who don’t neatly fit into categories. (Example: elderly white-haired men with two hearing aids editing their photos with their laptops and furiously typing on their PDAs during the trip.)

2. Set expectations correctly and then meet them. (Example: If you’re promising a tour of one of the world’s great museums, make sure it’s not mostly closed for renovation before that particular tour stop.)

And now back to real life…and earning money for my next trip (which my friend and I will plan all on our own, thank you.)