Or, more accurately, what if they threw a party but booked a venue that was far too small and so decided to lock the doors so nobody could get in? That’s pretty much what seems to be happening with Travelodge this morning.
At the time of writing this morning, I seem to be one of the many many people attempting to access the Travelodge website in anticipation of their winter sale deal. I take my hat off to the firm - they’ve done their promotion admirably. Previous customers have received direct emails of the offer, major newspapers have been alerted and awareness raising stories have been served to the press.
But as of the time of writing, all that effort is to no avail - because their servers have fallen over and have been so for several hours. And this illustrates the old adage that ‘you are only as strong as your weakest link’ but should also serve as evidence that your web strategy needs to pay attention to delivery of the product as well as the delivery of the message.
This reminds me again of the importance of ‘access’ to the product. The internet has been revolutionary is widening access to information for the potential consumer but to convert interest into action, online businesses need to ensure that access to the product is seamless.
Now, the issue of Travelodge not being able to actually serve any customers is an extreme one - it’s rather like shutting the doors of the shop because you think you’ve got too many customers outside. But the issue of access is an issue that is actually more widespread, albeit in a softer form.
At its most common, it manifests itself in issues of usability. If you can’t find the ‘add hotel to my cart’ button, that is an issue of access (it’s the same as not being able to find the cash register in a shop) and an issue of usability. Issues of usability can be overcome though - we’ve written before about the ways in which you can do this from professional services, ‘mother in law’ testing and multivariate/ab testing.
Although the issues of online access and the tools to overcome them might be new, any decent business manager should be aware that marketing their product (in the broadest sense of the word) is about so much more than promotion.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Marketing strategy, Online customer behaviour, Opinion, Research tools, Travel 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.