Talking the You’ve invested in a slick-looking website and an upscale brand. Do the contents of yo
Here’s a question. Let’s say we blanked out the logo and design skin on your site and asked people to judge it purely on copy and imagery. In a blind test, would they know you were a luxury business? Of course they would – it says so in the copy on your homepage. But what if we took that away too? What if you only got to communicate through the content on your destination and product pages? None of this is quite as theoretical as it sounds. Search and social acqui- sitions often directly bypass the home- page – it still matters, but the days when you could rely on it to tell visitors what you’re all about are long gone. At the same time, the shift to mobile browsing robs that swish skin of some of its power by upending the ratio of template to content; on a desktop display content floats around some- where in the middle of the screen, but on mobile it dominates. Your site lives or dies by what it has to say. So, back to the question. Our imaginary visitor can see that you do travel, and they can see that you go to some destinations associated with luxury. But can they differentiate
between you and a mid-market or a mainstream business? We did some quick copy analysis on destination and product pages for Mauritius across 16 travel sites, split 50/50 between luxury and main- stream brands. To get a sense of what operators talk about – what arguments they make for travelling, and what arguments for travelling with them.
We assigned each sentence to one of seven categories: 1. General inspiration, typical hotel features
2. Specific inspirational content (named places, specific hotel features)
3. Inspiration with reference to service 4. Inspiration with luxury keywords 5. Specific inspiration with luxury keywords
6. Reference to service with luxury keywords
7. Genuine luxury proof points (vivid detail of service/experience)
Here’s a look at what we found… ❋ Across all sites, sentences cluster around categories 1 and 2.
❋ Category 1 sentences accounted for 36% of the total sentences analysed, and category 2 accounted for 41%.
❋ As you’d expect, our upmarket operators skewed more towards sentence types that reference luxury – but only just. Of the sentences written by luxury operators, 79% were from categories 1-3 and 21% from categories 4-7. That compares to 92% and 8% from mainstream operators. Not as big a difference as you might expect.
❋ Categories 6 and 7 are all but non-existent
The stats above may not sound
catastrophic, but all they show is that our upmarket operators used the word ‘luxury’ (or similar) at a slightly higher frequency. Now take a look at the right-hand side of the chart, focus- ing on category 6 and 7 sentences. It’s a wasteland. The problem for luxury brands is
that they need to do more than talk about how nice Mauritius is. Mauritius has “white sand” and “azure seas” whoever you go with, so the point of
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