Joey Zeelen, Crowd DNA’s Head of Agency (EMEA), gives a crash course in how to go from a brand fling to brand love at Qual360 global conference…
One of our most recent – and most impactful – projects was built for booking.com, who wanted help to get closer to the intense excitement their customers feel about holidays and trips. Simply put, folks don’t swipe right on travel brands, they’re swiping right on travel itself. And booking.com wanted to use that energy to fire up the brand even more. So we set out to discover how to authentically capture love for travel – and foster brand love in that journey.
At the Qual360 global conference 2024, Linda Koelemij, booking.com Manager Qualitative Research & Insights, and myself will talk about how we took the brand back to its origin of loving travel. Here are three of the key destination points we arrived at on this project…
Not how they book, but why they book
We wanted to achieve an organisational and marcomms shift, and make employees and agency partners think differently and more diversely about holidays and trips. Rather than the purpose of travel being a function; to visit a city or to go to the beach – we looked at why people book. What role does a trip fulfil in their wider cultural/ or personal context? Through personal travel diaries, virtual visits, and IRL dream trip sessions, we learned that booking travel is about fundamental emotional jobs. Participants told us about wanting to connect with their loved one – to experience joy, freedom, belonging, happiness, indulgence, and the list goes on and on. This is why they travel. This is the goal they want to achieve. This is their job to be done. And it’s definitely not functional.
Our journey to finding brand love for booking.com
It all starts with stories…
We really enjoyed hearing stories like the German couple having loud s*x as they took a holiday without their young children. The amazing research stories revealed human truths… truths that were endearing, emotional and just very real and fun: Perfect food for creative partners to riff from and create more diverse and authentic campaigns. And these groups of truths led us to fundamental jobs to be done – learnings that were critical for marcomms, the marketing funnel and creative diversity but also for product teams to design new features around.
From a fling to brand love
Ultimately all the human truths revealed ten fundamental jobs to be done. And it was through knowing about these – the quick escape from everyday life, the great annual reset, the pivotal life-changing trip – that we could strategise from fling to brand love. It’s this perspective on customers and travel that is now helping booking.com get closer to their wealth of customers and why they do the things they do. Helping with journeys, channels, marcomms and general audience understanding. It’s a great destination to have arrived at. We love booking.com and can’t wait for our next research date…
If you’d like to learn more about how cultural insights can help a brand ignite more brand love, get in touch: hello@crowdDNA.com