A colleague recently reported having changed a Howard Johnson hotel reservation to another, albeit lesser-known, hotel, completely as a result of reading some negative reviews of the HoJo property online. I found a particular interest in his in-going latitude of acceptance with Howard Johnson, as well as the negative word-of-mouth that shook him off of the hotel after he’d already made the effort of seeking it out and making a reservation.
I was a Senior Copywriter on the Howard Johnson account at Christy MacDougall Mitchell in 1996 when we re-branded Howard Johnson, and co-authored the tagline, “Howard Johnson Makes You Feel at Home.” This positioning was largely a result of key insights into consumer values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations (VABEs) that resonated across all of our pre-strategy consumer research. Many Americans associated Howard Johnson (also, “HoJoâ€) with a bit of ‘Americana’ heritage, and held beliefs that this is a familiar and lasting brand name that calls to mind a more relaxed time in our national history – an era that, in retrospect, was arguably more values-oriented with respects to ethics, morals and the importance of the quote-unquote nuclear family.
We saw this as a great opportunity to leverage that ‘warm’ feeling, especially in the national TV campaign copy I wrote, which included, “You know when you’re traveling, you look for things you know … things that are familiar, that make you feel comfortable … that’s why it’s always so good to see the Howard Johnson sign.†The idea was that many Howard Johnson ‘road warrior’ customers, particularly 10 years ago pre-Expedia, did not make reservations in advance, but would see the sign while driving (mostly at night) and pull over. We wanted the campaign to help make the Howard Johnson sign the one they felt good about among unfamiliar options.
In reality, we found that they also held assumptions that these Americana relics were aging, poorly kept hotels. Unfortunately this was derivative of their expectations not being met on recent visits to Howard Johnson. This was the key challenge of the holistic marketing effort … if the properties weren’t sufficiently upgraded so that the consumer experience matched their in-going expectations, they likely would not come back again. I think this remains a challenge with the chain, as evidenced by the poor WOM my colleague found regarding the Howard Johnson location in his online search. Alas, we did what we could….
Posted by: Colin Mangham