Article Review: “Starwood asks guests to share opinions in-house” – The Economist (10/26/11)
The Starwood Hotel Group – Sheraton, Westin and W brands – is enabling customers to post reviews of its hotels directly on its company website. As of late October 2011, they are the only hotel group to be doing this.
This direction draws immediate criticism. Why? If it isn’t an independent/third-party site, reviews could be “adjusted” to represent Starwood favourably. Fair enough, if you want to think cynically!
The Economist’s article cites three major arguments against Starwood’s big idea:
- Customers can’t compare across other brands and hotel groups.
- Guests likely won’t use Starwood’s site as their forum of choice. (Guests are more likely to mouth-off cowardly (anonymously) elsewhere.)
- Reviews may be unnaturally positive.
Before reading more, if you have similar reservations (pardon the pun), ask yourself if you might find skewed or fake posts on TripAdvisor. Keep in mind that a third-party does not, and cannot, verify that a reviewer actually stayed at the hotel they reviewed.
Starwood can verify that reviewers are legit because a reservation number is required to make a post.
Regardless, my belief is that Starwood has different intentions here – more than merely enabling reviews to be posted for all to see.
Groundswell Thinking
I suspect that someone at Starwood read Groundswell.
To the author at the Economist: Read this book to better understand the opportunities available for businesses in this era of “everything-social”.
Never before has there been more channels for consumers to easily communicate with each other. Anderson Cooper isn’t the only one “keeping them honest” anymore. Sorry, Anderson. We all have that ability now – and the more the merrier.
But let’s flip this around for a second. This newfound communication does not need to be uni-directional. Groundswell explores strategies that uses this growing phenomenon to engage customers, improve customer service, and increase sales. They call is “Energizing the Groundswell”.
How do Executives at Starwood know their hotel brands are performing well? How do they “keep them honest”? Total annual sales, likely. But how are mediocre sales evaluated? Without perfect information (i.e. knowing everything about everything), the economy can be blamed, or the decline of local tourism could be blamed. It really doesn’t matter. Surely, the manager of an under-performing hotel will take the lowest hanging fruit of an excuse to report to their boss. That dynamic isn’t important to this conversation, however.
If the Executives at Starwood could pull together extensive focus groups to tell them what is wrong at their hotels, the known reason behind failures would likely be different than “the economy”. Reasons for failure, or lost sales, would be honest and more specific.
(Chicago has 18 Starwood-operated hotels. How does a loyal “Starwood Preferred Guest” choose where to stay? Think about that).
I suspect Starwood is “energizing the groundswell” by focusing on their loyalty program followers. For the travelling salesperson wanting to stay at a “Starwood” to use their points and upgrades to get the best rooms available, knowing where to find the best Starwood property is a great thing. If you don’t understand this, ask someone to explain it to you. People who travel, all of the time, get it.
I agree that it would be tough to argue that this is a sustainable competitive advantage. Any hotel group can create this service. However, with this idea, Starwood is saying that they want to improve their product, and they are willing to own the mistakes they make – they want to be kept honest. The frequent traveller appreciates that – it is going that extra mile for customer service. Anyone would appreciate that.
Implications for eMarketers in the Travel Industry:
This poses an interesting threat to TripAdvisor. Suddenly, with one swift blow (done right), all those loyal to the Starwood brand stop visiting TripAdvisor because what they need is on the Starwood site. Of course, this concept must be implemented in the correct way – with honest and quick reaction. A negative post must be visible to all, and swift correction must follow.
Starwood is leading the way in segmenting the “review market” and I applaud them for it. Instead of sitting back and taking steps to, hopefully, garner positive reviews on independent sites, Starwood took to the offensive. They changed the game for, perhaps, a segment that generates the most revenue.
This concept inspires us to think differently about user-reviews. (Shocking that we now see TripAdvisor as a normal way to seek travel reviews – The times sure have changed). Perhaps this is too far outside of the box, but what independent/third-party platforms could be moved in-house in other markets? We will leave that to your marketing-genius-imagination.
Implications for marketers in the Medical Device Industry:
This concept can be applied anywhere, including medical devices and health care. If you’re a large manufacturer of medical devices, would you value the wiki-feedback of surgeons or nurses everywhere? Maybe, maybe not. The competitive landscape here is much different than hotel accommodations – which I won’t get into with this post. Your business might take a turn for the worse, if all of your competitors or physicians knew what was negative about your product! However, there is nothing stopping an internal forum or review site, accessed by username and password. Having real-time feedback of products could improve product design, innovation, and ultimately patient care.
This is inspiring.
