The judo move

Something I talk about a lot when doing strategy is the “judo move.” A principle of judo is using your opponent’s size and strength against them. Here’s a real-life example:

I once did a pitch for a hotel brand where the campaign goal was to increase the percentage of total bookings that happened on the brand’s own site - essentially to steal share from aggregators like Expedia.

There were no extrinsic rewards for customers who did this. The price wasn’t lower, they weren’t eligible for more loyalty points, there was no preferential treatment we could promise. And we needed to focus on leisure travelers, because the hotel loyalty program was already pulling business travelers off of the aggregators.

The strength of the opponent

The aggregators’ key benefit is that customers can see every room available on their dates, making it easy to compare prices and location. We needed to come up with an idea that made people want to NOT comparison shop.

The insight

We thought about what contributes to a sub-optimal travel experience. Ever get to a hotel with a pool for a family vacation with young kids only to find the pool is out of service, or gross? Or check into a “non-smoking” room that smells like smoke? Or book a room with slightly sloping floors so the dresser drawers keep slowly sliding open? (That happened to me last week.)

Stuff like this can range from being a bummer, to actually ruining a trip. Feeling like you made a bad choice, or let your family down, can have a profound impact on your enjoyment of the vacation.

The judo move

The strength of aggregators is that they level the playing field for all hotels by comparing them on attributes travelers want to shop by - price, availability and proximity. But that’s also a liability for travelers, because all hotels that check the right boxes with those attributes don’t deserve to be on a level playing field. Some of their experiences aren’t captured in the aggregators’ knowledge graph.

That's by design. Aggregators are designed for a satisfying shopping experience, not a satisfying travel experience.

This makes it easy to feel like you’re doing the right thing (your homework when shopping) when you’re actually doing the wrong thing (booking a room that will make your family judge you).

So the judo move here was to portray aggregators’ leveling of the playing field as allowing crappy hotels to hide among decent ones. The strategy was to show travelers that if they booked direct with the brand there was no danger of ending up in a hotel that compromised the rest of the trip.

The strategy line we landed on was, “Book direct with <Hotel> and it’s guaranteed not to suck.”

We didn’t win the business but the client is still my hotel brand of choice. And I think pretty often when I travel (and book direct) that yep, this hotel doesn’t suck.