What luxury travellers want: the hero’s journey
Storytelling and luxury travellers, why the journeys of their dreams are not what you think
( Go to -> versione in taliano)
Luxury in general is undergoing an identity crisis, in the travel compartment more than in others. Luxury in no more abundance of richness as luxury lovers now seek quite the opposite: a legendary intangible treasure.
Put yourself in the position of those who made through many many expensive experiences and answer this: if you could go anywhere, with no limit of time and resources, where would you go? If you could buy anything, what would you want to buy? Exactly, you would seek unreachable places and unattainable things.
I found out that Capella Hotel Group is making a luxury tent camp in Ubud, Bali. Can a water cup in a tent be a luxury treat? The point is that it’s not the water cup the object of interest, we need to consider what is not an object, what is important is always intangible. What luxury travellers seek is totally in their head: if travel operators want to emerge above the sea of proposals and options luxury travellers can choose from, they have to understand that more than a truly lush experience, travellers need someone who can guide them towards this ethereal prize.
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” — Joseph Campbell
This basic concept is not new and you can see it mapped on the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. All travel experts, such as Amadeus and Skift, agree on the fact that luxury tourism moved to the last spot on Maslow’s Pyramid, going from the previous self-esteem floor to self-acualization.
The biggest differente between the two floors is that self-esteem is based on respect, something that comes from others, while self-actualization is based on our own talents, something very personal and based on our own vantage points.
In this new perspective, we shouldn’t marvel when we stumble upon such terms as bliss, transformation, mindfulness, ecc. in marketing literature and this is why tracing the new buyer’s journey becomes sort of a problem.
What do luxury travellers want?
First thing, give for granted what luxury travellers do give for granted: quality, assistance, technology, personalization, well being, wow factors, and some millennial’s specific value such as culture, first hand experiences, green causes. This battle field at the moment sees neither winners nor losers, no one has found the traveller’s Graal yet.
Christian H. Clerc, Four Seasons, President of World Wide Operations during a recent meeting in Cannes said that luxury operators have the mission to help travellers live their lives and journey around the globe: no matter how varied are their desires, the truth is they are very similar, and it is fundamental to take inspiration from them.
So, if we want to win the feeble attention travellers have for traditional luxury, we need to use a different framework, a different ‘journey’, probably not including the now useless word ‘buyer’.
In the last years we have seen the rise of experiential travels. These kind of travels work well because luxury travellers crave knowledge and new competences. They really want to understand other cultures and gather as many ‘culture coins’ as possible. In fact, all luxury brands mainly sell culture, they teach and initiate to the many pleasures of life and, above all, they teach values that originate from tradition, arts and crafts, the local territory or the entire planet.
For sure, education is the best service brands can offer to their client, especially in luxury, and this mentoring activity is the strategy many luxury brands have adopted to initiate their clients to the peculiar tradition of their products.
But this doesn’t yet explain what luxury travellers want. The answer is, again, to be read on Maslow’s pyramid highest level: it is not what you can learn from others that matters, instead it is what you learn about yourself, and this is what travellers ultimately seek, to become heroes of their lives.
Storytelling, the hero’s journey
Joseph Campbell spent many years of his life trying to demonstrate that all the fantastic heroes’ tales, all the myths are built upon few common narrative elements, the main why being that we ultimately aspire to the same noble cause. Myths and other fantasy tales are built on frameworks intended to show us what to do to become masters of our own lives and get free from (not only) consumeristic pressures that crush us since early childhood.
Campbell explains very well intangible concepts like bliss, fulfillment and transformation, the same that appears in modern marketing literature, and the ones that travel operators indicate in their research papers as main thrusts for luxury travels.
So, if the main aspiration of luxury travellers is the privilege of being who they are, it is strongly recommended to develop different kinds of communication and ‘luxury journeys’, more along the thoughts of a philosophers like Campbell, and to forget about classic marketing buyer personas.
The search for the intangible
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell analyses the most important myths on Earth and concludes that they all share a common scheme which, in brief, is divided into three stages: Separation, Initiation and Return.
In Separation, out hero is inspired to search something new;
in Initiation, we see him armed and ready to overcome the obstacles that prevent him from reaching his goal;
and in Return the hero completes his journey, he gets back home to pass on what he has learned in his journey.
With this simple scheme we can already highlight three different moments in which a brand can, in order, Inspire, Educate and Help the aspiring hero.
The goal of the ‘real’ heroes of the past was very practical: if they wanted to explain to their tribe how they killed a big boar, they could only tell the actual story, possibly a memorable one. Such stories, passed on and enriched from generation to generation, become myths that in their essence maintain the intent of teaching.
Nowadays goals are far different, especially talking about luxury, but Campbell’s philosophy highlights how this concept is still valid: even the modern hero is inspired to learn something new about himself, wants to get better, wants to go beyond his possibilities.
Listening to a story and being captured by it is way better than listening to a cold lecture, because a story offers more richness and, above all, hope for change. When we say that luxury travellers seek the intangible we refer just to this concept: a transformation process.
The word bliss is often used by Campbell in his books. Do you remember the question posed at the beginning of this text: if you could go anywhere, with no limit of time and resources, where should you go? The bliss concept can probably give us the perfect answer: doing something new, get insanely curious, escape the usual things.
The big promise of bliss is that if you really follow your instinct, the universe will offer you new possibilities and surprises, you will see new doors where just a moment ago there were walls.
This is what luxury travellers want: to find a door no one has yet found, a place inside where there is joy so the joy will burn out the itching pain.
You can object that these concepts are too far away from a marketing perspective, on the other hand I find essential to try hard to think like a luxury traveller. Learn to speak the same language of who is going after his heroic instinct is fundamental. Who’s after luxury wants really hard to be special, and he has all the resources he needs, if we can give him some guidance, we have already won him.
#travel, #luxury, #campbell, #maslow, #storytelling #bliss
***
Author and journalist since many decades, Nick Gandolfi thrives in the complex world of digital and content marketing where he curates the many contents and digital services which float on the web. Storyteller at heart, Nick Gandolfi published comics, kid tales, mystery novels, tech, history and cultural articles (few e-books too). Nick Gandolfi firmly believes that all stories are important because they go to the heart of things and people. This articles appeared originally on my Linkedin profile.
