Vijay Dandapani

Online Travel Agencies like Expedia and Orbitz have roiled the hotel and, to a considerably lesser degree, the airline industry since they appeared over a decade ago. The hospitality industry has made several attempts at asserting a degree of control over distribution channels but  has, thus far, come up short. The latest foray led by the industry's national organization, AH&LA  and STR (the industry's leading supplier of benchmarking reports) is in the form of an extensive report entitled "Distribution Channel Analysis". 

The much publicized 200+ page document quite obviously has much to say that is truly meaningful with regard to the dramatic changes in distribution channels that have severely affected profitablity for all offering specific pointers that range from the economics of pricing, the advent of "soft brands" that mimick many of the features of traditional hotel...

Two recent though disparate developments affecting consumers could enable marketers across diverse fields to better attract the attention of consumers' whose behavior is even labeled as "irrational" by some researchers.

The Huffington Post has an article from the Yale Center of Consumer Insights saying that the received wisdom of economists and marketers has "long assumed that potential customers rationally weigh the costs and benefits of every possible choice before deciding what to buy" needs to be turned on its head as "recent discoveries in behavioral economics and psychology demonstrate that consumers seldom behave rationally, meaning that neat frameworks are not, in fact, useful for predicting consumer behavior."

Among the pointers to look for per the Yale Center is a need to factor in environmental...

That Google is referee & judge to any and everything dependent on its search engine has long been a source of joy to some and frustration to many leading to a long running anti-trust review by regulators. Appearing at the top of a search engine results page is a holy grail sought by marketers in every field for being on the wrong (second or subsequent) page can likely mean a quick end to many businesses.

So when Google's Official Webmaster announced a "page layout algorithm improvement" last week e-Week termed it as punishing "Website publishers who dump loads of ads at the top of their Web pages to make more money at the expense of exposing visitors to their content.

The faux high-brow...

The McKinsey Quarterly, a publication from the consulting powerhouse, McKinsey & Company, recently put out a practice brief entitled "How centered leaders achieve extraordinary results" in an effort at understanding the "extraordinary stress" on leaders caused by a fast-paced, complex and volatile work environment. 

The report identified the "five dimensions of centered leadership" as "meaning" as in infusing a sense of meaning both at work and home; "positive framing" in terms of how leaders frame the world - optimistically or pessimistically;  "connecting" with folks "across the ecosystem" rather than linearly down a chain hierarchy;" engaging" to lead change and "managing energy" to sustain change. All great macro points that are brought to bear on a specific example in another report from the Quarterly entitled "Inside P...