I find marketing interesting from an oblique point of view- I have worked in marketing handling technical product management before and I am always interested in how companies successfully sell their ideas (& sometimes how they don’t!)
We went to Salou last Summer with Thomson, a large British package holiday Company brand, part of the German TUI Group. There wasn’t anything in particular about choosing them over the competition, just the right mix of hotel, flights and pricing. Anyway, Thomson are big on keeping Customers engaged, with frequent email offers of teasers.
Last week, a personalised mini-brochure arrived which featured our last holiday and suggestions for future ones. This was a rather clever hook- it had a few recognisable photos of Salou in it and had the family name woven into the body text all over the place.
This has to be a rather expensive marketing tool though, as to personalise an eight page full colour stapled brochure must be expensive on computer processing as well as the individual printing.
As it happens, all of our 2008 holidays are sorted and our long haul carrier of choice is Virgin Atlantic for 2009. (We are frequent Virgins, a contradiction in terms of course).
