An Agency’s Brand Creation (or Makeover)
Just like people cannot excel at pursuing every skill, companies cannot excel at providing every kind of service to all kinds of people. Mindlessly, companies often forget this idea and make out their businesses to be too broad than they actually are. They lose their strategy and, thus, their brand image. A brand image is a critical component of every successful business, as it creates a pathway that connects the business with it consumers, for whom the business exists all in all. Defining and maintaining a company’s brand image is, therefore, crucial and more simple than it seems. The following is a must-have guide for every travel agent to generate or refine their travel agency’s exact brand image:
What is the mission?
When you ask a heart surgeon what they do for a living, they answer- “I perform various cardiac surgeries on people with heart complications.” They do not tell you about how good they are at also playing the piano or cooking a paella; after all, that is not why they are heart surgeons. Travel agents must ask their host travel agencies the same thing- what does this agency do? The answer can be labeled as the agency’s mission and should not be longer than a sentence long. If travel agency ABC is good at selling inexpensive, high-activity backpacking trips around Europe the, the mission can say, “Travel Agency ABC specializes in selling exciting and affordable backpacking trips around Europe to those seeking adventure.”
What is the vision?
The vision takes the mission twenty years into the future. What kind of purpose in the industry does travel agency ABC plan to serve twenty years down the road? Perhaps, the mission could be “In the next twenty years, travel agency ABC plans on continuing to bring together young people from all parts of the world in Europe, as well as starting a host agency branch of the business.” This statement clarifies both the meaning of the work that the travel agency is doing now as well as the work it aims to do later.
Who are the customers?
Segmenting a travel agency’s consumer pool allows for it to focus on how to best deliver its services as well as market effectively. Let us consider travel agency ABC again. Since the travel agency focuses on selling inexpensive, high-activity backpacking trips around Europe, the consumers in the selected segment should be interested in just that. Therefore, the travel agency should focus on, let us say, people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five in the middle class who are interested in lively, rather than relaxing, vacations.
Which of the resources are rare?
What makes travel agency ABC better than the travel agency next door? And why should customers by from that agency rather than from another one that specializes in the same area of travel? Travel agents must perform an objective analysis on the resources that their travel agency has and how it uses them, tracking down what exactly makes them stand out. Whether it is the contracts established with larger firms, superb customer service, unique language spoken by sales representatives or an efficient, in-house-made system for managing client data, an agency must have that special ingredient. In the case of agency XYZ, for example, their rare resource could be their connections with various-language-speaking tour guides in several European countries.
What does the image say?
It is now time to bring all of the pieces together and design your Travel Agency’s brand image. Building off of the aforementioned example, agency ABC could be viewed to have a culturally-immersive, inexpensive, but also trustworthy brand image; the travel company aims to expose young people to European cultures, offering low prices and established connections with locals. By combining the mission, vision, customer base, and rare resources, a brand image is created. It is important to note, however, that establishing a travel agency’s brand image does not mean that changing it is forbidden; an image can definitely evolve, but having one at all times is pivotal to maintaining the the travel agency’s direction and customer attraction.