lastminute.com: what one marketer learnt about marketing by moving there!

At the Marketing Forum held on the Aurora, I attended a talk by Simon Thompson who is the marketing head for lastminute.com speaking on Getting the Most Out of Online.

As his background before moving to this survivor of the dotcom boom (owned now I think by Travelocity) was in more traditional non-online marketing businesses, he spent most of the talk discussing just what had struck him or he had learnt by moving from the traditional world of marketing cars (his most recent role) into an online business where you can do something and see an immediate effect - and so know if it works.

Here are some things that I took from his talk:

Consumer expectations in the future: immediate

He spoke about how the whole mindset of people in the online world was so different to the traditional industry world and how people working in marketing, development and sales are used to deciding to do something and expect to do it immediately and know within a short time if it works and then adapt, drop or move on. This has implications both for how we all need to understand how consumers of the future will be, as he points out that younger consumers these days are growing up expecting immediacy and fast outcomes.

Constant optimisation of the offer and product

It was also just amazing how they approach the business with a mindset of constant optimisation and incremental improvements all the time, versus the approach of traditional businesses more familiar with resisting constant fiddling with the formulation and packaging of products.
It was quite fascinating how some seemingly small changes like increasing the font size of links and shifting a tab for Spas more to the left drove sales of anything up to 30 per cent immediately. They also grew sales by 50% by cutting the time it took to bring back results of searches by 1 second...

It struck me that this is about constantly working and obsessing about the offer to consumers and something that everyone should be more aggressive about. I know in my experience in traditional products businesses we all tend to work more on the: if it isn't broken don't fix it.


Power of search, but the importance of good old-fashioned loyalty
I also learnt that although spend online marketing is growing very fast, that just under 60 per cent of spend is on search. This explains why Google has such huge revenues!

But he also explained how they found that people who type the URL of the site in directly are worth at least 60 per cent more. He spoke about how traditional media based campaigns like posters had been instrumental in generating traffic and traffic entering directly. The consumer sees media and access as just that, everyone in marketing needs to think like this.

Consumer centric understanding

He also spoke about the importance of being very consumer centric, and the understanding and using data.

They, for example, through a data driven understanding of consumers know that most theatre tickets will be bought on a Thursday afternoon as that is when people think of weekends and what to do. That most hotels and holidays are booked on a Monday morning as the weekend has been used to research and decide what people want to do and so on. The younger you are the closer to an event they will book, and the older people are the more they want the reassurance that there is a number they can call if they need help.

Your thoughts on what we can learn?