Digital Chatter Episode #002: Aaron Gravett

Eric: Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Eric Sharp and this is Digital Chatter. And today I have as my guest Aaron Gravett. Aaron, say hi to everyone.

Aaron: Hello everyone.

Eric: So Aaron is the former Director of Global Sales and Marketing for IHG and he is currently a consultant out in the field working in the hospitality industry. And has quite the career doing business strategy and marketing. Aaron, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself and how you got to where you are today.

Aaron: Thank you, Eric. Love to and thank you everyone for joining and hopefully learn something new about me as well as hopefully I can add some value to your business. So I have a background in real estate as well as finance by education in finance. But my passion really is creating business models and how companies can help and deliver to customer segments value proposition. So the past two years at IHG, I've been working on confidential projects, NexGen Technology Solutions products as well as services to deliver to 5,000 hotels four different regions and how do you package that and deliver that to hotels in a cost effective and value-add manner. So background is a little bit scattered but really all tied together through looking at business models and value propositions for customer segments.

Eric: It's great you bring up value proposition in the marketing field the same field that I'm in, I mean that's huge. I mean having this value proposition. How important is it to differentiate yourself in the market?

Aaron: Differentiation means a lot of different things to companies. So a global company tries to differentiate by offering a plethora of services, products and services, within a portfolio. Smaller companies try to differentiate themselves by offering niche services. So it really depends on what the target audience is, what the customer segment is. Obviously you can go through a mass marketing and mass effort or even go through the niche. So for me it's really trying to figure out where the company - what products and services they currently have and how they're going to leverage those core capabilities and deliver that next gen product and service to their core customer segments.

Eric: OK, tell me what were some of the more effective methods while you were working with IHG that you can confidentially discuss with us? What were some of the positives that you found from that?

Aaron: The positive is that the IHG business model is the franchise model so that the company itself doesn't own a lot of hotels. Therefore we are servicing hotels and from an operational perspective we have owners that we engage with. So over the 5,000 hotels we have many different ownership groups from the luxury property all the way down to the mid-scale versions of our properties such as Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express. So we found success by working directly with the owners on targeting specific problems and pain points, if you will, not trying to boil the ocean but trying to really isolate what can we solve the next few years and what are the major issues and headaches that we can tap on and take off the list quite easily for the owners where it's going to be a win win for both the customer and the hotel user. And then also the owner. So we actually serve two masters, if you will - two customer segments. One is the owner and then the second is the actual hotel guest.

Eric: Yeah that that's true. Anytime in business it has to be a win win. The owner of the hotel needs to be generating income which makes the hotel continue forward, and it's all for the guests.