Target Market of Expedia

Expedia Group is a multinational online travel company that helps business and leisure travelers plan, book, and improve their trips. The organization provides various services from hotels, airlines, car rental companies, and cruise lines. Expedia has a wide range of brands to meet the needs of travelers, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Egencia, and Trivago. We’ll look at Expedia’s Target Market in this post to understand how the company has remained so popular and successful.

Moving forward, we will analyze some of the Expedia Group’s campaigns.

Let’s take a trip.

Travel limitations for some extend well beyond a loss of enjoyment, relaxation, or vacation. Others had to stay apart from their families in foreign nations and continents since they had jobs overseas.

In the grand scheme of things, the virus has had a devastating impact on the worldwide tourism sector, which has seen a 42.1 per cent decrease in 2020. And it doesn’t appear to be on the mend any time soon.

Many business and tech companies, in a brief time, came up with various and unique campaigns that could somehow make the whole situation not so much stressful as it was.

One of such companies was Expedia group.

Expedia, a well-known travel business, realized the pandemic’s devastating impact on its income in September 2020, nine months into COVID-19.

Worse yet, analysts were not optimistic that things would improve shortly.

Most businesses would contemplate layoffs, organizational reorganization, and other cost-cutting measures to stay afloat until conditions improve.

Expedia, on the other hand, had a completely different opinion. They realized that people needed to feel enthusiastic about the future of travel now more than ever, so they created the marketing gem that is Let’s Take a Trip.

Furthermore, for its primary yet inventive way to cope with the unpleasant circumstance, Expedia has won unceasing applause and critical acclaim from marketing sites such as Marketing Week (selected one of the most excellent ads of 2020) and TrendHunter.

Indeed, the public received the ad so well that it spurred Expedia to launch a follow-up effort called Trips Together, focusing this time on flexible booking alternatives.

The sequel has already inspired many videos (several of which have amassed millions of views). Still, one thing remains consistent throughout them all: stop motion animation is present in every one of them.

Where next?

A couple of months later, after launching “Let’s take a trip”, Expedia continued supporting their customers, encouraging them to keep up with their dreams, as the opportunity to travel will be available very soon.

The campaign, which ran from May through June, enabled travelers to virtually explore destinations and uncover spectacular full-screen pictures and information on well-known and lesser-known destinations worldwide.

This new campaign, created by the company’s in-house creative agency, Creative Partnerships, helped destinations stay at the top of travelers’ minds for future travel consideration, paving the way for the company to rebuild trust with travelers around the world and capture demand when the time is right.

The Expedia group includes built-in social sharing features to broaden the campaign’s reach and engagement, allowing users to share their favorite destinations with friends and family on social media and inspire other travelers worldwide to plan their next vacation.

Whether it’s encouraging tourists to plan their next vacation, informing them about the condition of travel, or capturing demand, we’ve got you covered. The campaign demonstrates Expedia’s belief that the more they can assist locations and the broader travel industry with recovery efforts and help tourists go places, the better off everyone will be.

People, businesses, and economies throughout the world rely on travel. After a calamity, tourism will always play a crucial role in reviving the economy and aiding destination recovery.

In most countries, the pandemic is over. What now?

As travel starts to come back, Expedia switches its strategy:

Expedia Group, a vacation booking company, is revamping its app and website to emphasize collaborating with customers on their travels rather than merely focusing on the volume of bookings. Moreover, it expects to launch a global advertising campaign to accompany this week’s repackaging.

The phrase “It matters whom you travel with” is part of the new brand strategy, indicating Expedia’s intention to be more of a travel companion who can help customers get more out of their journeys. The corporation stated that it would invest in marketing for the first time in five years but did not indicate how much it would spend.

Expedia claims to have undertaken customer research into what they want from a travel provider. New packages that bundle flights, rooms, and activities with a total upfront price are among the upgrades. An enhanced virtual agent can assist passengers with hotel health and hygiene information.

“In 1996, Expedia group officially began their work. And that was an incredible moment because it converted every traveller, every consumer, into their travel agent, which was extremely powerful,” said Shiv Singh.

“It was a year of reckoning for the tourism sector,” Singh said of 2020, “because travel plummeted off a cliff.” “However, it provided an opportunity for us to go deep and analyze, study, and learn more about our customers in a way we had never needed to before.”

According to Singh, the company acknowledges that travel is becoming a more deliberate option for consumers, valued rather than taken for granted. According to the company’s research, consumers have desired to travel more due to the stay-at-home period. They want to get out of the house as long as it is safe and comfortable.

“We know, thanks to Covid, that expectations surrounding travel and what it means to be the ultimate travel companion vary, and we want to serve that whether you’re ready and it’s safe to fly tomorrow morning or six months from now,” he added. “And whether it’s for a beach vacation or a business trip, whatever the case may be.”

The corporation celebrates the repositioning with a global advertising campaign featuring a television spot starring Rashida Jones in the United States. The corporation collaborated with Publicis Groupe’s Saatchi & Saatchi on the campaign’s creativity.

To better understand Expedia’s positioning strategy, we will look at one of its famous slogans. 

A slogan is a phrase that expresses a company’s values and how its products or services might benefit customers. 

Throughout its business history, Expedia Group has come up with different slogans, and each of them represents and highlights significant features of the company. 

The one that we decided to concentrate on is “Where you book matters”. 

The new slogan encapsulates the idea behind the new brand campaign, which included the new tagline, a revamped brand emblem, and an integrated advertising campaign that began with TV, print, outdoor, and internet executions throughout the holidays.

This slogan shows that the company cares about their customers, especially customer service. ‘Where you book matters’ proves that the company has already acquired all the necessary tools to provide excellent and careful customer service. 

Now, let’s watch one of Expedia’s commercials to understand their targeted Segment.

We chose to analyze the commercial for Expedia’s campaigns, Let’s take a trip:

For the last two years, none of us has seen much more than the stuff all around us that we keep at home. The COVID-19 hit the whole world unexpectedly, and in captivity, we became the hostages of our own homes.

Instead of flying across the world for two years due to significant pandemic instances, the only thing we could do was look through our old images from 2017 and 2016. We posted pictures and videos on our social media accounts (typically Facebook or Instagram) with the hashtag flashback to the good days.

In the commercial, we see a young couple who, as we can assume, loves travelling. The events occur during the years of a pandemic, the years of complete isolation. Since they had no way to get out of the house, they decided to take the risk and travel… without leaving their living room.

They cycle through numerous classic travel scenarios, such as driving a car on an open road, trekking up a rocky slope, and even cosying up in a hotel room, using innovative stop-motion animation. The video concludes with the agency assuring viewers that Expedia will be there for them when the pandemic improves and travel becomes feasible again.

Thus, we can conclude that Expedia targets Conscious Progressives.

Young people who are Conscious Progressives are open-minded and generally clever. T^U(They constantly gather and study the most up-to-date information about the technological world to get new knowledge to apply to their decision-making. They are interested in foreign cultures to the tune of 80%.

People that are conscious progressives have an analytical perspective. They are incredibly competent, adaptable, and friendly. Knowledge is their critical distinguishing feature, which they use to set themselves apart from other individuals. They value education and do not set aside funds for it.

Progressives with a realistic outlook on life are known as conscious progressives. They do not squander money (66 per cent only buy clothes if they need them). They are charming people who cherish other people’s honesty. Because they are well-informed and intelligent, misleading and fooling them throughout the transaction will not succeed.

I recommend that you be completely honest with them when you meet them; this will be the most critical component in becoming loyal customers of your brand. They may be spontaneous, but they prefer to be well informed when deciding where to go, what to do, where to purchase, and so on.

They regularly buy books, electronics, laptops, smartphones, and other IT products. They also participate in a variety of workshops and courses.

When it comes to buying, they are pretty analytical. They spend much money, but it’s all within reason. They primarily purchase equipment and are uninterested in fashion. They prefer to shop online because they are resourceful and don’t mind making mistakes. They, like everyone else, make purchasing decisions based on emotions, but they are just more demanding in terms of functionality.

As I have stated, Conscious Progressives are well educated, whether in college or already employed. School is the path forward for them.

They place a high value on knowledge and will put their trust in their brains to make the wise judgments that will allow them to achieve and succeed in the right way. They continue to educate themselves and expand their knowledge base outside of education. Their self-assurance is built on a firm foundation of knowledge.

Newspapers are also of interest to conscious progressives (50 per cent read daily). They get a sense of gravity and mental intricacy from newspapers. They want to know the country’s political and economic issues to apply that knowledge in any discussion.

Sage, Explorer, Caregiver, Creator, and Everyman archetype brands are most appealing to conscious progressives. The brands’ Jester, Ruler, Lover, and Outlaw aren’t as attractive for them.

To sum up, this analysis helped us learn many essential and unique aspects of Expedia. By analyzing their commercial’s two most popular campaigns, we now know what elements allow them to be one of the most successful travel agents. We also paid attention to the segment of the company, which showed us the human characteristics that Expedia loves to see in their customers.

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