On Dec 17, 2009, at 8:28 AM, Paul Sherman wrote:
My point was that the design differentiates Marriott from its
competitors in a small but real way.
Actually, the home page change is not particularly significant. Having
spent many hours of my life watching people book hotel reservations, I
can tell you that this change isn't significant at all. My bets would
be that few, if any non-designer users, would notice the change. I'm
also betting that it has very little effect on customer brand
engagement, because, in our research brand engagement comes from total
service delivery, not any single page's design.
And given that Marriott plays an industry that is widely seen as
commoditized - at least when you get to the level of the big hotel
chains catering to the business traveller - this design goes in the
"win" column.
Show me proof. I've got lots of data that says that is unlikely.
Don't get me wrong. It's a neat design with cool moving parts. But, if
you look at the total experience that a Marriott customer has
(particularly biz travelers), this one page (which is the only snazzy
part of the redesign) is truly insignificant.
If you want to look at pages that will have an impact, I'd look at the
subsequent two pages: the search results page and the property details
page. Travel shoppers spend more than 10 times as much time and energy
on those pages in a given session than they do on the home page.
That's where the meat of the online portion of the experience is.
And it's all balanced by what happens at the property. If the hotel
stay is great, it doesn't matter what the web site experience was -
brand engagement will strengthen. And if the hotel stay is crappy,
brand engagement will weaken, no matter how slick the online booking
experience was.
So, if Marriott is looking to move out of a commodity viewpoint,
particularly with frequent travelers, the home page is the least
likely way that will happen.
Of course I'll never know how the design has affected key
performance metrics. But I am assuming that Marriott wouldn't launch
this design without a good amount of A/B/multi testing, so they must
have a handle on how it has impacted KPM's.
Be careful what you assume. That's all I can say at this time.
Jared
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