T1. My personality

This is ‘Katy the Half-Dog’ [and no, I didn’t take the photo!]…  She is one weird character: perhaps only half a brain, but certainly blessed with an out-size heart which more than makes up for it!   If one got all anthropomorphic and ascribed to her a range of characteristics that seem to reflect her personality I might venture the following:  a bit fearful; doesn’t like any change whatever to her daily life (even to a bag not being where it should be); nervy; worried; trustful; a ‘sheep’ (a follower, not at all very adventurous), intensely happy predisposition, despite worries, needing reassurance, intensely solicitous of the needs of others (dog or human), dislikes surprises, avoids any conceivable risk like the plague  (she won’t set a paw on manhole covers, for example)…..  I could go on.

Why on Earth does this matter?

Well, what sort of ‘holiday’ would Katy like?

One might well suggest that with her dispositions and preferences she wouldn’t like a holiday – she would prefer to stay very much within her comfort zone (as represented by her home and garden) rather than risk the unknown.  You would be right.  Katy hates travelling anywhere – even a short trip up to the woods in the car ‘spooks’ her.  When we did try to take her on holiday in France with us, she needed so much ‘Dozy-vet’ to calm her down (but still less  than the limit for her size of dog) that she barely got it out of her system before we had to dose her up again to face the journey home.  It wasn’t fair on her and we have never attempted a trip with her again.

As to foreign travel, for most of his life my Dad said: « I don’t need to go to another country – there is a heck of a lot of England I haven’t seen yet! »  Most of his travel choices were based on the familiar and the relatively close to home (choices his parents had made too through necessity as they were on working class wages – which rubbed off on him).  He also preferred home comforts (international standard hotel comfort) – he would not have settled for living with a local family, ‘roughing it’ a bit and hoping to pick up a bit of the language. This was part personality and part experience.   During WW2 he was billeted with an Indian family who spoke no English: he felt isolated and overwhelmed by the local and totally unfamiliar culture and submerged by the size of population.  This experience stayed with him all his life.  He was perhaps a bit ‘Katy’.  The point is that the type of personality, character and past experiences drive Tourism preferences and choices.   Certain types of holidays will suit certain personality types and not others.  Saying that, later in life, my Dad ‘threw caution to the wind’ and headed off on a range of international trips – usually cruises with pre-programmes tours.  He managed to find his ‘wanderlust’ at last (perhaps because he did this in the company of a new wife who was more assured in her travel abilities), but still needed the insulating matters of English speaking, English food, and the comfort of a western bedroom and bathroom.

So what do we learn from this?  That people are all different and what they want in tourism terms is likewise different BUT it is not eternally fixed: people can change to certain degrees with experience, time and other influences.  Older dogs, like Katy, can learn new tricks. In fact Katy is currently doing so.  As a puppy she didn’t play much on her own or with out other dog but now she is just discovering play and even initiates it.

And you??? …………………..;

Task 1.

1.  On a loose piece of paper write down all the aspects of your own character and personality that you can think of: bullet-point them.   Aim for 20.   Write them clearly enough so another person can read them. DO NOT put your name on the paper.
2. Hand them in to me when you are finished.  I will then re-distribute them randomly to your colleagues.
3. When you receive the personality profile of one of your colleagues:

• read it at least two or three times (for content not handwriting you might just recognise) and try to paint a mental picture of the individual
• what sort of holiday would this person really like
• what sort of holiday do you think they clearly would not like
• (without any signs, checking or talking)… WHO amongst your peers do you think the profile belongs to?
• we will then ask the writer of your profile to consider your holiday propositions and to what extent they believe they would consider buying them

The challenge for the industry is to know their clients and potential customers well enough to be able to offer them something that will interest them.

Generalising is cheaper, for sure, but YOU are not ‘general’; you are not an average: you are YOU – unique in all time and right now upon the surface of the globe.  You may be broadly similar to others in certain ways (which is why we speak of  shared personality traits or commonly held values by people of a given culture.   So when it comes to Marketing, generalising with a sort of ‘One -size-fits-all’ approach is unlikely to work (at least not for everyone – no-one likes being treated as an average … we all prefer things to be personalised.).   Adaptation to specific cultures is a sort of ‘half-way-house’ in which one recognises that certain people share certain basic common beliefs and values, but that is not a full-blown form of adaptation which recoignises the individual and his/her personality, values, beliefs, preferences: it is a long way short.

The Challenge.

For those who are seeking to persuade us to choose their brochure, their holiday, their hotel etc, broadly speaking, three options appear to be available:

1. Standardisation.  A fixed offer based upon the most commonly shared characteristics and personality types which we often call ‘cultures’.  It is the cheapest option (because one would not need to vary the product offer, the marketing or the clientele), but it is likely to be the least attractive to any one individual (because it is not personalised at all).  If, however, it pleases the majority in a large market and the costs have been held down, it might well be a way of generating reasonable profit.
2.  Limited Adaptation.  An offer which allows some product or market adaptation in order to recognise simple differentiations between groups of people within the market.  This will cost more to produce, but if the adaptation is capable of attracting more revenue than the cost then it can be worth the effort.
3. Personalisation.   An infinitely variable offer which can be fined tuned to a particular individual’s needs.  Clearly this is the most expensive of the options largely because one has to gather a lot of information about each individual in order to tailor-make a personalised offer that is very attractive indeed.  Again, provided the revenues outstrip the costs, the option is viable.  Think Amazon.  Think how loyalty cards enable stores to offer you personalised offers etc…

The questions are therefore:

1.  Which option is likely to offer the best rate of return in principle to a given company?
2. Do we have the expertise to engage in personalisation or even marginal adaptation of our offers?

So it is clear that the answers are not the same for all operators……

So, clearly you can see the link between our personalities/ characters/values etc and how we may potentially respond to tourism promotional offers.   This is why companies spend so much money on research: to get to know us.  Then they can set about determining which sort of approach to use to catch our eye and make us buy!