Heads In Beds Show - Design And Branding Tips To Get More Bookings & Attract More Homeowners

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down the design & branding elements you need to be successful in your vacation rental business. We break down the design vs branding debate along with how guest and owner marketing go hand-in-hand.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellBrand Guidelines for Platform Sites (Airbnb/Vrbo) to Earn Brand SearchesThe Payless ExperimentConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Good afternoon Mr. Manzi, how's it going? Well you know we are winding down our summer here. It feels, I don't know, it has the feels

of another year that seems to have passed us by too quick. I don't know, I feel like the golf is getting better this time of year, maybe for us, mostly for the pros, but it's time. You're dealing with a little weather right now. How are you doing, sir? Are you okay? I feel all right there. Soaked is how I'm doing. So yeah, for those listening, this will come on a few weeks later, but we're dealing at the moment, we're recording this with the sort of remnants of this Debbie hurricane, which is not a great name for a hurricane. Can I just say that right now? I'm all for like a bit of an aggressive name.

Like this is an aggressive thing that's happening. Debbie seems like a nice person. Like I have a client named Debbie. She's delightful. Like I love, she's very friendly. She's not someone who's going to come in and be like a hurricane that's going to like damage anything. So I'm not a fan of the name, not a fan of the 15 inches,

I kid you not, of rain that have showered upon North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina over the past few days. So brutal roads are kind of like in okay shape. Nothing horrible has happened to be clear, you know, to me or my family or anyone that I care about, but it's certainly, you know, there will be flooding in other parts of South Carolina, North Carolina, and that's a bummer for people down like Charleston and stuff like that. Not a great thing. Can't do anything about it though. You know, it is what it is. The rain comes and you got to deal with it. So I'm not a fan of it, but hopefully it'll dry up. And if you're listening a few weeks later, hopefully all the everything's in good shape at that point and

nothing too bad has happened. When the wintertime when we're recording and I have blizzard warnings, then you can make fun of me. But at this point, right, it's just, it's just a matter of making sure that everybody's safe right now. So and I think we will talk about like reacting to some of these in some point in the future. This is this is a topic that we do have down the road a little bit. So I'm interested to talk about that a little bit. But we got some some good things to talk about today, too. We do. We have design to talk about. So although I'm not a huge fan of the weather, you know, I am a fan of design.

It's interesting. I think this is a bit of my weaker spot. And we talked about this a little bit previously where I myself am not designer. I've made jokes with clients before where they're like, hey, we need new ads. And I'm like, I agree. Let me assign them to my excellent designers that I brought on to my team. So they can actually design something because you don't want me designing anything. It is not my strong suit. But I feel like when we talked about this in our pre our pre recording,

that I know good design when I see it. And I think the guest does too. So maybe that's kind of something we'll go through today, which is that design can be a bit of an advantage for you because the guests can respond positively to design and we'll break down to the difference between design and branding. I think these are kind of different things. But it's one of those pieces where certainly the amateur small time host is not often investing much time,

energy, effort, resources into great design, into great branding. They're kind of putting out stuff that doesn't look amazing. And it makes them look, by extension, a little bit cheaper, a little bit lower quality. Whereas if you're listening in your professional property manager, this can be something that kind of sets you apart a little bit, how you present yourself online.

Again, we'll talk about design and branding, but it's a bit of my weaker spot. I know Paul, you are someone who maybe is not opening Photoshop and logging in and doing that kind of stuff all day. What's kind of your take on like the importance of design in the marketing assets that we do, whether it's guests or homeowner or both? Yeah, no, I agree.

This is not admittedly, I like the numbers. I like the strategy more than this. I can't define what it is, but I know what it is when I see it. I can't define what good design is, bad design is, great branding is, poor branding is. But I know what good branding is, I think, when I see it there. It plays a critical role, I think, both on the guest side, but certainly on the owner's side, because it is more of a long haul type of marketing strategy that you're doing. The one call close just doesn't happen. The one click booking just doesn't happen on the owner's side of things. So having that high quality design that doesn't make you look like an amateur shop

or anything like that, I think it's critical because we've all heard the anecdotes of someone saying, oh yeah, I saw the postcard, I got the postcard, I kept it on my refrigerator for a few months and then, well, you would have to have a reason to keep something on your refrigerator or something like that. Something is compelling you to do that. Maybe it is the USP. Maybe it is a whole lot of other things. But in most cases, it's going to be that visual. It's going to be that brand. So yeah, it certainly

helps to be able to do it. But also that's why we find people that are much better at the design side of things and do understand color schemes and the importance of font and logo and all those things playing together. So yeah, not my area of strength, but I still think we can have a good discussion about what we know and we understand does help overall with design and for branding. Yeah, well, not to toot our own horn,

but maybe it speaks to our credibility that we're talking about stuff that we're not experts in, but we are encouraging people to invest their time, effort, and energy into it. So we're like, hey, don't hire us for design directly, you know, like I have someone on my team now that handles design, you know, that would do a much better job than I do. But you said something there that wasn't in our outline, but maybe this is a good way to define it going forward. It sounds like part of the design benefit that you see with homeowner marketing asset or a guest marketing asset is memorable versus forgettable. So when a design asset maybe isn't done well to define that better of like what does that actually mean it's something that's forgettable. You see it, it doesn't really stick in your brain, you don't think about it much at all, it's easy to, this is a classic kind of direct marketing test, everyone gets a bunch of mail their inbox and they have an A-pile and a B-pile right so that the bad design thing or the

forgettable design asset on the homeowner marketing side may be taking that B-pile and throwing it in the trash, most likely. The A pile is something interesting. I just want to look at this. What is this? It's so funny. I'm re-reading this book right now. Although the listener is not going to see this SEO book for beginners. This is the Ahrefs book. Just because I'm kind of going back to the basics. I have someone on my team who I'm kind of training. And I'm like, let me make sure I don't assume they know anything. So I'm kind of going back to the very beginning and I'm working on this book. And this book is, it sits on my shelf shelf but it looks nice. Again, listener can't see

this but it's a deep blue color. It's a hrs blue color. It's got an interesting font on it. It's appealing and there's something about it that I think I just find myself picking it up because of the way it looks. And then the way everything's laid out inside it's easy to understand all the fonts nice and readable. There's a lot of little things there. Again, can I really define exactly why that's good design versus not good design? Not really, but it's memorable and the book is memorable in the sea of books that I have on my shelf, that one sticks out to me. So it's a good example, I think, of this broader discussion around what makes design good or helpful for your business, what makes design maybe more of a neutral or negative in your business.

It's are you being memorable or are you being forgettable? That's a good way to think about it. So this is the way I thought about it too, just to define that idea a little bit better. Pro design helps you a bit, but I think in some cases it's more so like bad design that costs and makes, you know, you look cheap or makes you lose direct booking. So it's more of that second point that I think some people struggle with. So is there a big difference between spending, like let's say $10,000 on a custom website design

versus $100,000? I don't know if that's necessarily the case. Like maybe there's, you know, that top tier, maybe there's someone that's like a little bit better, fractionally better, or they can explain their color systems a little bit more differently than that person that's very good. But I don't, I've not seen that before. And I've had clients that have gone in the deep end with respect to design and said like, design and branding is everything.

I also don't believe that to be true either. It's not everything. It's a part of the overall picture that we're presenting when we are doing marketing, media, advertising, etc. online. But it's not everything. But I think what I've absolutely found to be true is that when we take something that was designed poorly, or it was very forgettable design, and we make it very good, we see an immediate lift. We see the same traffic converting twice as good, we see everything working a lot better by kind of doing that refresh. So maybe you can react to that idea of like, how much does good help you versus how much does bad hurt you, if that makes any sense. I think it's the key. I think everybody's seen the what feels like clip art logos. I mean we've referenced that before too. The luxury brand with a comic sans logo or font or something

like that. I think there are just some key things that they just don't go together logically. Just looking at some of the examples that we have in the outline here, those homepage videos, though they have to be perfectly produced, no, not necessarily, but I also don't think you can go through and just have cardboard cutouts or stick figures that are that are trying to explain what makes your business better. Fond and colors, I mean, that's something that we've all seen kind of those eyesore colors, like a big bright yellow with a big bright red and some other green color.

I think there's a difference between interruption marketing in social media and interruption marketing on your brand website. You're not interrupting anything at that point outside of people's ability to want to stick with you and see what else your business is about. I think that you can actually scare people away with the wrong branding. For a full website, that's where that bounce rate metric in Google and Universal Analytics was so lovely because you could tell, oh wow, 70% of people once they hit my homepage are bouncing right away. They are not going to a second page. They're not going to a booking page. They're not going to a traveler page. So I really think that there are some ways that we can tie some of the elements of design

and branding into how we look at overall performance on the analytical side. And that's where we get to inject our part of the design, our understanding of design of, okay, the concepts look pretty, the fonts look good, the colors look good, but how are people actually perceiving the brand? And how far are they willing to learn about your brand? Are they willing to get down to that booking area? Are they willing to get down to payments and going all the way through the process? So I think it is. I think the next, really, how do we break down what is design, what is branding?

Because we are, we're maybe universalizing a little bit of this. So why don't you hop into design and branding there and we'll keep going there. Yeah, no, I think this is worth breaking apart at this point because I think mostly we've talked so far about design, but we kind of, we've done some different pieces about branding.

So this is kind of what I, this is what we kind of came up with together during our process here. So I think design is really about the visual elements. So exactly how does that font look on the page? Exactly what color are you using with respect to the layout of your logo, the layout of your buttons, what's an action button, what's not an action button, what's red, what's blue, what's purple, what's green, all that kind of stuff. So visual elements, in my mind, is strictly a design decision. Design is what's the need or problem that you're trying to get towards. So again, the idea of a homeowner landing page, the design should indicate that it probably needs a contact form to reach out and then potentially book a call. So that's the design might include those kind of UX elements or like UI elements on the page itself. Design could be sort of, you know, it could be something that you do initially one time to like build out your initial scaffolding of what things look like. We'll talk about print books in a minute. So we'll come back to that idea. And I think it really is about aesthetics. It's about how it looks and the functionality of how

those things actually, what's on the page and how does it look, I think is a good way to think about design. Or it could be what's in your hand, what the actual postcard looks like, and what's the actual functionality of it with respect to the phone number on there, what form we're asking people to fill out, and so on and so forth. I think branding is always a broader piece of the puzzle. So branding in my mind is like, what's the identity of the company? So a company that's more serious is not going to use the, I mean, you're joking about it, but they're not going to use the Comic Sans fonts or more playful fonts

if you're a very serious company and you're talking more about tax accounting and things like that. That might not be a brand that would make a lot of sense to people. Going into the vocational side of things, it's like a brand that's more focused on this kind of high end luxury feel is probably not going to use these bright pink colors or things like that. They're going to focus more on the dark blues,

the grays, the blacks. They're going to have the gold accents on things. There's certain things that you could see that are communicated in design, but they're decided with branding. That's kind of how I thought about it when we were putting everything together. So it's kind of like your perception of the design. So when you're looking at the design, what do you think of when that's sort of like, we're all, you know, we all have our own biases, or we all have our own preconceived notions, which maybe in a way, you can tap into that in a good way, you can like, again, use black with a gold leaf on the side of it, people might think, oh, this is interesting, like, what's this look like? I get a lot of direct mail from American Express, and they do that with me sometimes, they want me to like sign up for their platinum card, they're just like desperate for me to sign up for the platinum card. And they send these like invites where I have to like, rip a little gold seal off of the, you know, direct mail when I open it. So that's like the branding of that is like, oh, you're part of an exclusive club. Again, did they say that? No, but it's like my perception of it is kind of what that branding element is. And it goes beyond visuals. It's not just the visual of how it looks, but it's branding is more of like what you're

doing and why what is your kind of company values, personality and promise. So as we break down those individual pieces in my mind, it's like, here's what we're going to stand for. Like, here's what our vacation company actually focuses on, which is why to give a quick like sojourn here, for an example, it's so hard to have a company that has like, one bedroom condos next to like 18 bedroom luxury estates, right? Like, and we have clients that have fit into that bucket before it, it's like, man, it's so hard to park at this because like, that person is not that person. They're not even the same zip code, literally,

figuratively, like they're not it's so we almost have like one homepage, but we have like three or four different like marketing campaigns we're trying to work through. And it's because their brand is very muddy. Like their brand is not clearly focused on like one thing. Or this has sort of been my complaint, chief complaint before, as you know, about being multi-market. If you're sort of half-heartedly doing multi-market, it's like, well, what does your brand stand for? Are you the best property manager in Colorado or are you the best property manager in South Carolina? Because those are two completely different things with completely different objectives and goals

and brand identities that you might need to communicate in visual design. So that's kind of my swing at it. What's your thoughts on like anything that I missed there, branding breakdown versus design aesthetic breakdown? I think you broke it down very well there. And for me, I take it back to, I didn't go to school for marketing.

This is something I kind of danced into, we'll say. And I remember kind of working in marketing teams initially and the concept of UI UX, I don't know, wasn't designed. So that didn't do anything for me. I didn't understand, but I do. I kind of think of the UI, the design is the user interface, the branding is the user experience. I mean, ultimately you're trying to do, I kind of think of the UI, the design is the user interface, the branding is the user experience. I mean, ultimately, you're trying to do, it's more than just how they're going to work with it one time.

It's how they're going to continue to experience it, not only when they're on the website, interacting with your brand, but after that. I think that branding takes you past just that initial engagement, if you've done it right. If you haven't, then I think you fall flat there and then you are searching for a way to maybe get gimmicky with your design to bring people back in. But that's kind of how I, as you're just going through everything there, that's kind of how I put it towards more of someone who is on the design side of things, they are. I think they're thinking short-sighted, you know, specific needs and problems. How are we addressing that need on the site? That's the user interface. How are we putting that call to action and that button in? How are we shrinking the page or moving the content up or down?

But overall, that experience that they're going to have with the brand is not just that initial engagement, it is maybe that initial online engagement, then the booking and then the on on site stay with you. It's I think that's where branding doesn't just take hold on the digital side, it really has to go on site into each property into each home into everything that you're doing there. So I think overall, I think you covered you covered every nail, just taking that little different spin on it and

looking at it that way. Well, and it highlights why we've sort of talked about people that have struggles growing their company a lot because their brand is all over the place. And maybe this, we can kind of use this episode maybe to point to people in the future and be like, well, let's define exactly what you stand for. It's kind of the classic example, right? Elevator pitch me your company, right? Or like Shark Tank, pitch me your company. And we think of it as like showing someone something new,

like, oh, you've never seen this product before. This is the, you know, the whatever product or this is the whatever company, it's a novel idea. Maybe like sometimes that is necessary. We have to like quickly explain what this new thing is if I need to be educated about it. But if I know what it should be and then it doesn't line up with what it actually is,

I think that's where a lot of trouble comes from, right? So if you say the example we've always given before, let's do that one from a few minutes ago. If you have a one bedroom condo next to a 16 bedroom luxury house, then it's no wonder that people have a hard time figuring out what to do and why maybe your conversion rate on online advertising, both from the guest side and the owner side is bad because people get there and they go, maybe they're neither one of those things. So they're more confused than anything. Right? But I think of companies that manage high-end inventory

and they only accept high-end inventory. know, it has to be five bedrooms, it has to be to the standard, it has to be on this, you know, size of the example, and I didn't get permission from this client, so I won't share their name, but we have a client who does an average booking value of over $10,000 per reservation. But they're, it's funny, right, they're constantly rejecting properties, they have more demand on the homeowner side than they know what to do with. And they go, yeah, it doesn't quite meet our standards. Or they talk to the homeowner, they say, you're close, but you're a little bit off, here's why you're off.

Fix these five things and then come back to me or we can help you maybe point in their direction of what this should look like. So again, that in my mind is all the brand. What does it stand for? What should people think of when they get to you? Because you can't be everything. I mean, most likely, if you're listening,

you're not gonna be able to be a Vakasa even, right? Who's trying to kind of do that, right? Vakasa is trying to be everything to most short-term rental travelers. And one would argue they're not making phenomenal progress, partially because Vecasa doesn't really stand for a lot. It's this idea of large-scale property management. I get there's places everywhere.

They accept any type of inventory. But the company they bought, funny enough, Turnkey, I thought they had a more clear brand identity versus where they have gone with the Vecasa folding them together. Maybe that wasn't the right idea, honestly. To give an example, like in our space, maybe it would have been better to leave Turnkey as like the high-end home type brand,

and then have maybe Vakasa be the more generalized brand. But it's like when you go to the Turnkey website, you don't only see the high-end properties. It's just an idea. And that can be communicated both in the branding side of it and the design side of it, which is kind of what we're talking about today. So I'm with you there.

I think it's like the outcomes that you're going to get from everything is like why the design matters. Because when people see it, they're going to form their own opinion on it. If it's not the opinion you want, like you're not going to make progress basically, like it's going to be challenging for you to make progress. And to your point of like it's UX, it's UI, that sort of thing. I had some fun examples that we put the outline about, you know, tools that we use every day or things that we use from a software perspective every day. And I mentioned a PMS platform that, you know, maybe we shouldn't put them on blast here. But I logged into this PMS platform and I kid you not, it felt like there was like a thousand items in the menu.

Like it was so challenging to log into this PMS platform and just run a report showing me like all the bookings that happened during July. Like I just wanted to run the report, get all July's data, put it in there. And there was the UI, the UX was so confusing. Maybe it was designed in a way that like made sense the person that designed it But as like someone that was new and had not used this PMS before I went in there and I was just like pulling my hair Out and I was like, I can't figure this out. I don't I genuinely don't know how to use this tool So that's why I think both these things matter both the design and the UI the UX and I compared it to like project management Tools, which Paul you know you and I've used different tools collaborating in our projects together for some time

You know I use base camp and I've talked at length about Basecamp on the podcast before as like our central PM tool. But it's so simple. You know, I think that's what's interesting about basically I don't look at this and think like I'm looking at the screen right now where notes are. And I don't look at this and think, my goodness, like this has the most novel, unique design. I've never seen anything looks like this before.

Like not really. The font sort of like unoffensive, like it's very plain, you know, everything's single column view. There's not a lot of like panels and widgets and things flying in. Like it's like everything's right down the like, it's very plain, you know, everything's single column view, there's not a lot of like, panels and widgets and things flying in, like, it's like, everything's right down the middle, it's easy to understand. I got, you know, currently, four things that have come in since we've started recording, I've got, you know, 18 other notifications in the haystack that I need to go through. But it's like two things I'm looking at plus the notes in front of me. It's simple, it's clear. I mean, it's easy to understand. Maybe

this isn't the most novel design thing, you know, we have clients that use like Asana or they use ClickUp or they maybe their design is better like aesthetically, but I don't feel like it's more functional or I don't feel like I understand the branding going back to that piece of it any better. And I think the same logic applies to vacational companies, you know, when I look at some companies, let's shout out one that I think does a really good job. We've talked about them on the podcast before, but Twitty has kind of its own design language. If you go to twitty.com, they're up in the Outer Banks, but they have a design and a visual understanding of how everything works that I find very easy to understand. I'm able to kind of see the properties, everything's straightforward from a pricing

standpoint, the fonts, I'm on the homepage right now, they break down the location, they break down the number of bedrooms, they break down the reason why it's on the homepage, like, oh, discounted week in September, new bookings for 2025 now open, a new listing. They have these little icons for different sub sub menus on the page that are very easy to understand. There's a dog for the pet friendly properties, there's an oceanfront one, there's a beach there. So it's just simple things. But like, I look at it, and I immediately get it. And I think that's what we should strive for. Honestly, for the most part with design, and then the branding piece is that I look at it, and I don't need to think too much beyond that, right? It's like hotspots properties, there's a little hotspots graphic, of course, like those things make sense. So those are some broader thoughts I

have about it. I don't know if you have any like design crushes or things that you like both like a vacation or brand or anyone outside of it. But maybe we could talk about that and give some real life examples to you. Yeah, I mean, on the project management tool, I mean, the one that I always thought was very simplistic to use is Trello, Trello boards very, you know, using like a cam band board, it's similar to base cam, very, you know, using it like a cam-bam board. It's similar to

Basecamp, but not overwhelming. I think it's great. You know, I think for some people, maybe, you know, different personality types, different culture index, whatever profiles those are. I think some people need that little extra spice, or they need the celebration, the celebratory thing, or I close the task and now I'm going to get a big whatever. Um, that's just not something I personally need. And again, I think those tools that that I find more helpful are there, they're just much more functional. And I think how do you know it is how are you going to balance that functionality versus versus the prettiness and what people what are I guess the other thing is what people what are people going to buy?

Are people going to buy something that's prettier or are people going to buy something that's that's a little more functional? I think with a SaaS product or something like that. Yeah, functionality is key, I would say, in the success of that product on the on the you know, consumer side of things. It is you definitely have to make things pretty. You have to make things appealing to that consumer. So I don't envy any designer ever who has to actually put their focus into understanding these habits. I spend far too much time than I should,

admittedly, in Microsoft Clarity trying to understand these things. And I do, I feel like I get a lot of insights, but I can't actionably take them anywhere and say, this is what we should do. I can say, this is what I'm seeing. What do you as a designer, how do you, how do you kind of connect that story and tell the end of that user story that we're missing right now? So I do, I feel inept. I feel like, I feel like I can have this conversation, but I just don't have the confidence that I am having it correctly all the time. So here are the tools. Tell me what I'm doing. Tell me what you think I'm doing right and wrong here.

Well, I think that's the fun part too, right, is that it is somewhat subjective. Two people may look at the same aesthetic and then come to two different conclusions. So if you're designing something, and of course, most challengingly, when you're designing for a client, you know, as we've done before, I think it looks good, the designer thinks it looks good, you know, we all kind of feel like it matches the brief that you gave us, or it matches the instruction you gave us,

and the client doesn't agree, well, what do you do in that scenario, right? Do we go with our intuition, what we feel is optimal? Or do we say, okay, Mr. Client, let's do it your way. And that person may or may not have the right background or context or information to make that thing successful. So, yeah, I mean, that's one of those things, right? Like if you're hiring an expert, I don't do car maintenance. So like if a car maintenance person that I trust that I believe is honest and has given me good deals before says, hey man, like you gotta replace this thing.

I tend to trust him. You know, if I've had good experiences before, I'm not gonna sit there and go like, well, the manual says I don't have to replace that for 10,000 more miles. Like again, assuming that person has your best interests at heart, I think trusting the professional is like more of my approach. Now I don't mind to replace that for 10,000 more miles. Assuming that person has your best interest at heart, I think trusting the professional is more of my approach. Now, I don't mind learning about things.

In the past, I've learned about things and got more educated on them and how they work. The example I've done this one before, I'm not a developer, but I spend a lot of time thinking about what languages we should use to develop in. Even though I'm not a developer myself, I think about the business case of developing in PHP, for example, where it's very easy and straightforward to find PHP developers, whereas it's pretty hard to find a Rails developer. If you build something in Rails, that's fine, but you're going to have a harder time finding someone to potentially replace that person or augment that person work alongside them. So PHP feels like a safer choice.

Now is the code is nice or is, again, going back to the design example, is the font is nice from this designer versus that designer? That's where we get into a whole subjective conversation that may or may not lead to a positive outcome. But to your point, what you said earlier, just to hit on that again, the market kind of tells you, right? Like if you put a website out into the world and you send a thousand clicks to it for guest clicks,

guest searches, and you get no bookings, then people tell you like your pricing's off, your design is not appealing, the property itself isn't appealing, there's no availability, so you're not booking. There's like a lot of questions that you can ask, but at some point, you'll kind'll know if you're on the right path or not, ultimately.

So that's one side of it. So I'm trying to be respectful of our time in our outline here, Paul. So I'm thinking we get to this last thing. So it's a different idea that I had. So two stories that I want to tell, and then we could do a bit of a branding breakdown at the end here.

So going back to this whole conversation of positioning, I'll put a link in the show notes to this YouTube video where it's Payless. So that long story short, this was a kind of social experiment that the Payless shoes brand did back in, this was a while ago, I think this was posted November in 2018. So it was quite a while ago. And Payless took a shoe store and they rebranded it to Payless. So they spelled it differently. Like they changed the whole positioning of how the store actually looked. It's all glass cabinets and high-end looking feel to it. They took a bunch of shoes out of Payless, like $30, $40, $50 shoes, and they put them into this supposedly high-end looking store, asked people what they thought of what these

shoes were actually worth, and then they saw what the answer was And of course, people are taking $50 shoes in their hand, and they're going, this looks amazing. The quality looks awesome. I would absolutely pay $500 for these shoes from this Payless store. And then at the end, the hook of the ad is that they break it down to them that these are in fact, $30 shoes from Payless. They've been sort of duped, so to speak. And, you know, people, you know, have the shock reaction, oh my God, that's the way it is. So I tell that story. Number one, it's a funny ad, like watch it. It's only 30 seconds. So you can kind of see the look on people's faces, you know, as they kind of realize that again, they've kind of been duped. I mean, not in

a harmful way, but just like, wow, like my perception of the shoe was completely painted by the fact of where I was, the, you know, the, the people that were presenting it to me, the actual physical environment I was in was changing my opinion so much of what is the $20 product. I just find that psychology fascinating, to be honest with you. And I think the same logic applies to the vacation industry. So you're probably right now listening, why the hell are you going on about shoes? If you position the property, have a beautifully designed website that's aesthetically pleasing, you have a brand that speaks to someone, they look at it and they go, I want to be there. That looks like something that resonates with me. I see myself there.

You have the right photography, you have the right layout on the property description page, everything's kind of, you know, fits together. You again, have the high end looking shoe store, you can kind of put a $20 shoe and make people think that it's worth more, right? So to that point of like, you could have a hundred dollar per night property managed poorly given to the right person in the right environment,

be a $500 a night property or a $300 a night property, when it's presented in that more optimal way. So it's just a little case study or a fun little example of like positioning and branding and design all blend together when it comes to showing off what that property actually is, what it does, why it's a good option for someone to stay in. And I thought it was a fun one. So I think I showed this to you in our pre-recording for the first time, this Payless.

I don't think you'd seen it before. What was your reaction to the sort of shock looks on people's faces as they pay 20 bucks for $500 shoes? It's that wow moment. The eyes get wider. I think you definitely had people who fit in with the high fashion. It would have been interesting to kind of mix who they were inviting. You got the outcome that you were looking for and it was very intriguing to see the audience they were going after

and how they knew exactly how to brand and merchandise exactly in that way to match what they were going after and how they just knew exactly how to brand and merchandise exactly in that way to match what they were looking for. Taking it back to another example of someone in the short-term rental space who really knows their branding, their merchandising. We both worked with this person. When they bring the rentals in, the persona of the home they're talking about is Sophia Laurent. And that puts you in a spot now,

a little older for us probably, but you have an idea that is a very iconic figure. You know exactly what you're getting into. Is this individual getting all the homes that fit exactly in that persona? No, but she's going to bring it to that level of this is the be all end all there. So I do, I think it really is about knowing

and sticking to it, it's your branding as well. You can't just throw the brand out there and then not have that be what you're going to hold your brand standards to. And that will end off there, I think in a little bit here, just kind of talk about that brand book brand standard. But I think it is, it's very similar to, you've got that $30, you know, you've got the $30 home or the $300

home, you can turn that into a $3,000 home with you are bringing that into your branding into your messaging there. So that was just one that kind of has we were kind of bouncing around there that that it stuck out to me that that is a very specific niche for what you're thinking your rentals are going to be, but that person isn't compromising on the brand at all. So when you know that that's what you want to be, be it. Right. Yeah. And then again, going back to my earlier comment, right? The market will tell

you if you're on the right path or not, you know, and the trouble with a commodity, you know, property management business, vacational business is that when you do have the same properties, everybody else, then it's purely a price game. You know, can I deliver a better service at a better price or, you know, maybe people are willing to, then it's purely a price game. Can I deliver a better service at a better price? Or maybe people are willing to pay a little bit of a premium, that sort of thing. But grocery stores are a good example too, right? My dad was in that business for a long time.

And people will pay a premium to go shop at Whole Foods and buy the same products that they buy somewhere else because they like the experience and like the brand. They like everything that Whole Foods stands for, right? It's different now, it's owned by Amazon, but when dad worked with them, that was not the case, right? And people associated with themselves with Whole Foods, and they felt better buying the same product from there, even if it costs a dollar or two dollars more for whatever the product happened

to be. So there's a lesson in there. I think people understate it because they think of the property as more at times of like an execution game, like who can clean it the best or those sorts of things, which do matter. Don't get us wrong. But it all kind of flows down ultimately into what you're putting out there with respect to design and branding. One more thing that wasn't there outlined that we can get to the last two things that we had here Which is that Airbnb announced I think for the first time really since they've been public company. Hey, we're about to have a lower We're about to have a soft quarter and I've always wondered this I've posited this question before I think on this podcast What do people do who are completely reliant on Airbnb?

What do they do when this was inevitably gonna happen by the way Airbnb wasn't gonna go up into the right forever And it's already happened to some people, you know But but now the Airbnb says publicly, like, you're probably going to be down like 15% this year. What do people in that bucket do when Airbnb was 90% of their bookings? My contention, I could be wrong, but my contention is that they can't do anything. Like the only thing they can do is lower price. Cause it's like, there's less eyeballs here.

I don't, I can't get more eyeballs. I don't have my own marketing engine built out again, whether you use a service or an agency like ourselves or not, like, you know, many clients that we've worked with that build out stuff on their own team. But if you don't have an email list, if you don't have a social following, if you don't have a website that you can send people to that you can get bookings off of, if you don't have those things and you're OTA only, and the OTA, I want to say goes to crap because it's not going to be that bad. I'm not like an Airbnb do-mister here or anything like that. But when it goes down, then you're kind of left with like one other

option, no other option other than changing pricing. I feel like that's your only lever that you can pull because you can't generate your own demand. So it's like, you're just a barnacle attached to the Airbnb boat. The Airbnb boat is now saying like, hey, we're about to go a lot slower. And I just wonder what that impact is gonna be. So, you know, think of these not just purely from like the,

I think some clients that we talked about before, they're too focused early on in the ROI. There was no ROI early on doing the design, the branding, the brand book, we can talk about that in a second. There was no ROI in like the first month or two months or three months. The ROI comes from like years of efforts and like long periods of time of like how people remember you and come back to you and find you and find those, you know, find the individual listing they've seen before. They see your photos, all these things, like it's such a long-term horizon and people are thinking they can make their money back in 30 days. Like

that's not how this works. So I talked about a brand book really quickly. I know that we've got kind of a grab bag here at the end. What is a brand book? How does that help someone make sure they're recreating the design effortlessly or faithfully, particularly when as situations you've been in the past, like maybe the service that you're doing is different than the guest marketing agency. How does that kind of play together?

How does a brand book help with those sorts of problems? I think it's, it's huge. I mean, we would be talked about talked about that homeowner and guest branding should not be separate. Like you should not, we can make the argument about whether they should be on the same website because the different websites that we've gone back and forth over that over time.

But just because they're sitting in different spots doesn't mean the branding should be different. Your homeowner branding should be very similar if not identical, to your guest branding and vice versa there. And brand books, brand guidelines are huge ways to do that. And breaking it down with every single asset, your colors, your fonts, those are things that the last thing you want is to have. I mean, I think we've all as marketers gone on and tried to find the hex code or

the number code for a specific color on a website, and you don't quite get it right. And everything just looks a little off. And that's the, it's just the worst thing in the world when that happens. So having those things very clear upfront just gives you a much better baseline to ensure that if you are working with an agency on the owner side, an agency on the guest side, maybe you're working with someone over here, someone over there, they're all working from the same information. You're all working with the same fonts. You're all working with the same messaging, the mission, the vision, all those, the core values, the principles that you're running the business

on, I think those should all be incorporated in somehow into those brand guidelines or the brand book, whatever that looks like. So I think it's just that fail safe to ensure that any asset that's being created by a vendor or someone else in your space looks the way you want it to. And I think it is from the agency side, not having to go back and forth six, seven, eight times on revisions and doing this. Yeah, that's going to happen. But if you have an understanding of what that brand guideline is, you should have a much clearer path to create an asset that everybody's

going to be able to get on board with. And that represents the brand effectively. Yeah. What are your thoughts? No, couldn't agree more. It's like one of the first or like first three or four questions on our onboarding form for like new clients for build up is that, hey,

do you have one of these things? If you do, please attach it. Send it to us so we can get it right from the beginning. You know, it just saves a lot of time in the term. And yeah, I couldn't agree more. Nothing worse, honestly. Imagine doing a lot of brand work and getting someone to recognize your company.

You know, you're making some progress. A homeowner thinks, man, I've seen their trucks before or I've seen that logo before or I've been on the website before. And then they get a homeowner marketing asset, let's say, and the logo is different, the funds different. I don't know, is that the I don't think that's the same company. Like that'll be the worst thing to like, get all the way to that, like progress point, and then blow it at the end. So I'm a big fan of that. Right.

All right. So last thing here, kind of, again, a bit of a grab bag here at the end, because these were in our outline, and I want to get to them. Branding on OTA. So again, a lot of OTA platforms are are going to try to suppress or eliminate your branding. There are some things you could do. So I'll go through this list relatively quickly. Host avatar photo is the logo or the company name. So if you have a photo on Airbnb or Verbo or something like that, make it a logo so people can see it.

And you might have to redesign or alter your logo to make it fit into that little circle. So you might have to do a different version with your design or something like that. But that can help. One technique we've seen before, we have a client that does this, is it's client's first name at the rental company name. So it's not hosted by, again, Conrad School Cabins.

But it might be Conrad at Conrad School Cabins. That's not a great example, to be honest with you, because most clients don't have their first name in it. But if Paul worked on the Conrad School Cabin teams, it could be Paul at Conrad School Cabins, which might be a way to get people to do that. So make sure that people could find the name. Obviously, the profile is a solid way of doing that. Also, filling up a description.

It sounds simple, but so many people don't do the about the host, which again, if you're not a host per se, you're more of that property manager type person, it could just be hosted by the company name and then fill that out. Talk about your company name there. Hey, where are you based? Are you local? Are you from afar? All those kind of things. Next thing we always do with listings when we can is welcome to property name hosted by company name. Right? So welcome to the old forge, a awesome cabin located in blah, blah, blah location and hosted by Conrad school cabin rentals or whatever the company name happens to be, simple one there. The other

thing I would say is that Sonder and other brands seem to do this a lot, evolved as this, as they mentioned the brand in the title. So actually putting it early on and saying like, you know, this is, you know, in the actual title description. Now it helps if you have a much shorter brand name. If you have Conrad School Cabin Rentals, that would be tough to fit that into the title, you may not be able to do that. But if you look at some of the examples, again, like Sonder and some of these large platforms

like Evolve, they do that. So anyways, we can do another episode on that. People are eager for more like tips or information on trying to get people off OTAs ethically and like, you know following all the terms of service But like leave little breadcrumbs for people to find I think those little things what would help So that's all I got for today ball. Anything else we should think about before we put a bow on this one. I Think we've we've done we've done more than maybe we should designers doing a design Back to back to SEO next week. No, but all good.

One thing that takes no design skills whatsoever that anyone can do if they've got a pulse is leave us a review. So go to your podcast app of choice. I was supposed to say Facebook. Oof, we're a little off today. Sorry. iTunes, Spotify, we get the most downloads. We appreciate your reviews the most, but any review helps us. Go leave in a review and then we can hopefully bring you more episodes on things that were very well versed. Design is kind of a bit of a soldier for us, but I think we had a good time today.

So that's all I got for you. Have an awesome rest of your day. Thank you for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much.