THE PERFECT HOLIDAY
A UK holiday provider wanted to understand the instinctive emotions its customers attach to their holidays across different occasions and seasons. Using implicit research, we measured the feelings that surface before people have time to explain or justify them.
THE
CHALLENGE
Holiday marketing typically leads with enjoyment and excitement, treating the family holiday as the core occasion. The client needed to know whether these assumptions reflected what its customers actually feel. It also needed to see how emotional needs differed between customers seeking short breaks, family holidays or couples’ breaks, and between peak and off-peak seasons.
THE M+T
SOLUTION
Rather than asking holidaymakers what they enjoyed, we ran an implicit study with real respondents to measure the strength of their emotional associations. We analysed the results by occasion, by season, and by whether guests had visited in one season or both. We also compared how people anticipated their holidays with how they experienced them.
THE
RESULTS
“Free” was the strongest emotion in the study, ahead of “Calm”, “Relaxed” and “Happy”. “Enjoyment” and “Excitement”, the feelings most holiday advertising leads with, trailed some way behind.
Short breaks with friends delivered the most intense emotional reward of any occasion, despite being treated as secondary to the family holiday in most advertising campaigns. Family holidays activated “Warmth” and “Comforting”, while couples’ breaks were the mostly “Restorative” and “Relaxed”.
Seasons split the audience in two. Peak season visitors sought activity and shared fun, associating their experience most closely with “Adventurous”, while off-peak visitors wanted to feel “Free”. Guests who holiday in both seasons were the most emotionally engaged of all, making them the most valuable customers to retain. The study also showed that holidays were typically experienced more positively anticipated prior to travel, particularly on excitement and energy. That gives the client a clear opportunity to promote discounted re-booking packages during a trip.
WHAT'S NEXT
The study established an emotional benchmark for the category. From the pilot study using human respondents, we can use the resulting data to build a BRAIN Model of a client’s category using our behavioural research and insight platform. New campaign concepts can then be screened through our neural network platform to identify which are most likely to activate the right emotions for each season or segment. The strongest ideas are then validated with real holidaymakers, so the research budget is spent where it counts.
