Guest Comment: ‘E-brochures give the competitive edge’

Comment by Greg Renk, managing director of e-literature producers, ebxp You don’t expect the printer to write and design your literature, so don’t let the IT department develop and manage your website. Travel trade marketers are learning this message fast because maximising sales while slashing costs is the name of the game – and it can only be played on the web. If marketing people don’t fully control the site’s look and content, then their brand image will be distorted. It’s a matter of graphic consistency and quality, where marketing must demand the last word after listening to sales, CRM and web content departments. Having wrested control, travel marketers must also turn a deaf ear to those who intone, with a sigh of relief, “we’ve now got our site, so that’ll do”, ducking the real issue of constant improvement of web marketing performance. The website should never be a compromise medium for want of innovation. Innovation in this context means more than creativity – it requires understanding new ways of making the web deliver travel trade marketing objectives. But this doesn’t drag you to back dependence on IT people to keep pace with technology. These new ways are delivered by suppliers who understand marketing and work directly with marketing people. Take one obvious key example of “that’ll do” thinking, relying on old technology: the universal application of the slow and cumbersome PDF file. This concept is now made obsolete by consumer-friendly e-literature that exploits new digital technology to create, on-screen, the three-dimensional look and feel of printed brochures, with instant turning from page to page. The images, printable at home, are sharper than PDF, with its cumbersome scrolling and slow, big-file downloading. E-literature is the quantum leap that the printing industry (and IT) has failed to deliver since Caxton. So who is pioneering this advance? Key travel industry organisations have decided that necessity is the mother of invention. Tour operators and tourist boards have to respond to hundreds of thousands of consumer requests. And they are converting these into direct sales, by-passing travel agents, with a new approach to web thinking, combining this with tightly targeted tactical use of printed literature for consumers not yet online. E-literature enables them to deliver their proposition instantly, while the consumer’s purchasing decision is still top-of-mind, giving them a real competitive edge at the same time as enhancing their brand image. Barbados Tourism, voted top tourist board for the last three years, didn’t get where it is today with “that’ll do” thinking. They have adopted e-literature as the logical next step in expanding sales. So too has Mark Warner, the market leader in specialist family holidays, who need to strike while the iron is hot during key consumer decision-making times. Online brochures that function like the real thing make the magic difference for them and others including First Choice and Jersey Tourism. Agreed, these advances are only possible through new technology – but the buck stops with the marketing chief, who should be firmly in control of the process.