T2. Differentiation systems

So, we have begun to think about the idea of personality, how we ‘tick’ as individuals and to discover that this matters because it is the driving force behind holiday preferences.  If you want to sell tourism products and services, obviously you need to be working towards identifying, understanding such preferences (i.e. demand at the personal level)  and designing & developing products and services to meet this demand. The question is: how, exactly, and is it possible to group people together who would appear to share common personality traits and preferences? It looks like we are going to need a criteria set, a ‘hitlist’, if you like of traits and characteristics by means of which we can clearly identify commonality and therefore difference.

Your Task (a) … there is a ‘(b)’ below!.

1. go back to your lists of characteristics for Task 1.  Let’s go through them in order to identify a complete of characteristics criteria which we could then use to apply to anybody.

2. I am an ‘anybody’ – so apply it to me.  Ask me questions from your characteristics criteria list, then in teams try to recommend the sort of holiday you feel I would like (and contrarily what I clearly would NOT like!) and how you might seek to sell it to me.

Further Issues

OK, so you should be feeling a strong connection now between people’s personality and character and their potential holiday preferences. This still leaves us with a number of outstanding issues:

• is your system of differentiating people’s personalities and characters fully-developed and perfect?  Might psychologists and perhaps Social Science researchers,  Tourism academics and practitioners have refined the criteria set through empirical research?  (Clearly there are other models out there – what are they and how do they work?)
• How, in practice do companies actually use such approaches to ‘tailor’ product & service design to the needs of their targeted clients?

Before the modern age of computers marketeers tended to simplify things to a few proxy, social indicators from which they believed they could ascribe some common characteristics to groups of people (even if they were not always directly related to psychology, there is a strong causal link between them):

1. what was the person’s job. (Very low pay => lack of education =>  )  UCSF has a handy background paragraph on the subject.
2. which newspaper did they read.  (Designator of social class  etc)   See Yes Minister and the ‘I look up to him 1960s  and revisited 2000′ sketches …. OK, it is British comedy, but there is a good, relevant visual point in there.)
3. whereabouts did they live.  Well they didn’t have the sort of information we have today – for example a site profiling the population by post-code: Try these UK Postcodes and see the freely available information today from checkmyarea online:   Leafy village near Salisbury in the South,   Edge of inner-city industrial town in the North,  Opulent central London.
4. had they been to university or not
5. Age
6. Marital status

Task 1(b)

In teams of 5 (one for each aspect of the profile) consider the profiles hereunder. Take each aspect of the profile in turn: what might you fairly comfortably infer in terms of that person’s life and character?  Paint a broader picture of people in this category.  Taking all these things together, what sort of holidays might they like?

1. Company Director + Times reader + living in the countryside + University Masters + Age 54  + (re)married with 4 children
2. Part-time job + online news reader + living with parents in inner city flat + doing a Master’s + Age 25 + single but in long term partnership
3. Manual worker + Daily Mirror+ living in town + School Leaving Certificate only + Age 36 + Divorced, single parent with 2 kids.
4. Retired + Daily Mail + living in retirement home + University degree + Age 74 + widow

So, what have we concluded so far?

• people’s character and personality is important to all aspects of Tourism choice
• to be effective and efficient Tourism providers need to be selling us products and services which are (in an ideal world) designed especially for each one of us.  [Anna Pollock, a consultant presenting a paper at a Tourism and Technology conference in Edinburgh in the early 1990s made a very telling point: « We are now leaving the age of the mass market and are entering an epoch of mass markets of one »  – i.e. the individual becomes a market in his/her own right to be addressed as such by those wishing to sell].  If individualisation of product design and offer is not possible then grouping people together on the basis of commonalities is a sensible option.
• It is not easy (though, with technology a LOT easier than it was) and can be costly to find out information about everybody individually, so we resort to using social indicators which tend to group people together who share certain attributes / characteristics.  For sellers, this represents a way of narrowing down the field and focusing marketing activity.   For example if you were looking for the people who had the means and the will to enjoy a world cruise, it would be pointless sending a letter or brochure to every home in the land… sorting by post-code could be a much more effective means.
• As technology advances, then the job of seeking, retaining, analysing & evaluating and making available & utilising critical personal information is rendered easier and much less costly.  Take Amazon, for example. my arrival page is like no other: my past history of purchasing and looking and wishing dictates what is on there.  For example it knows I like Jackson Browne so it will tell me he has a new album out…….  it moves from just meeting my needs in a reactive way it becomes proactive and can make attractive things I did not even know were available to want!