Customer experience best practice: lessons from TripAdvisor rating star’s ‘sparkling sunshine’ strategy you can apply to your business or job interview
- A hotel marketing manager hit on a formula for success: avoid the negative by maximising ‘contact points’ with guests and ensuring they are positive
- Her application of what’s called the peak-end rule raised her boutique hotel group’s ratings on TripAdvisor to five stars, and it can work for you too
Hospitality marketing expert Adele Gutman has achieved extraordinary success at the Library Hotel Collection, whose boutique properties consistently rank at the top of TripAdvisor lists. Gutman has identified the importance of the peak-end rule, where a bad last impression is worse than a bad first one.
In The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, science writer John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister, a social scientist and psychologist, examine Gutman’s techniques and ask how they can be applied to other situations such as job interviews. Here’s an excerpt from their book.
So Gutman has been barraged with queries from other hoteliers and invitations to give master classes at trade conferences. She can talk the business‑school talk, expounding on “best practices in reputation management” and offering mantras such as “service Is marketing”, but there’s one phrase she keeps coming back to: “sparkling sunshine”. She says it with a smile and a fluttering of her perfectly manicured fingers to illustrate the sunshine her staff are sparkling over every guest.
“You have to double up on the good things,” she said. “If you manage to connect with every single guest, you’ve given yourself an insurance policy against bad reviews because they’re not likely to say something negative about somebody who’s their friend.