Why Millennials maybe oblivious to your hotel billboards!

Millennials simply love doing stuff!

“Owning” is taking a backseat to “doing”. You don’t need a car, you can Uber, you don’t need an office you can rent a desk at wework.com and you don’t need to keep strangers out of your home, you Airbnb it to pay for an experience you have been dying to have. This is probably the most significant generational shift we have seen between generation Y and their parents.

Facebook, Instagram and snapchat are designed less around what people are wearing and driving than what they are doing.

The get and go attitude millennials seem to have is mostly motivated by the need to distribute photos of themselves on social media.

The Harris Poll found that factors such as a craving for recognition (for example, how many likes someone gets on their Instagram post), and a “fear of missing out” help drive millennials’ cravings for experiences.

This unprecedented shift in wanting less stuff and more experience requires a swift response to “emotional” rather than “visual” marketing.

Hoteliers who want to attract local millennials and influence their hotel booking decisions are better off spending their marketing money on a virtual reality experience during sales calls, free yoga classes by a yoga guru at the hotel gym or organising a client paintball competition, than buying space on a static billboard.

To sieve through the noise and compete for the millennial limited attention span the ideas have to keep coming and evidently the more bizarre an idea is, the more photo worthy it is!

A typical example, is the recent Diner en Blanc event in Philadelphia where 4,500 young adults paid $35 for the privilege of bringing their own picnic basket and dinner and sitting among thousands of strangers for an evening!

Rethinking marketing channels is becoming a priority, especially for hotels who operate in a highly competitive environment.