What’s behind the numbers? An intense fight to win customers, a relentless battle. And on many occasions, we find ourselves alone in a wild and aggressive environment.
Not long ago, in one of the classes I taught to the students of the Advanced Revenue Program at Forst, I told them that there are many battles to fight to attract the customer, but the real way to achieve this is the battle for web traffic. That’s where the real competition lies: whoever wins the battle for the audience will win the customer.
The most common method is “clickbait,” which aims to generate the highest number of visitors to a website by showing us something that grabs our attention, so that with that misleading “click” we end up where they want us to go, not where we intended.
And how do they manage to take us where they want? Through the well-known disparities on metasearch engines. That’s how these “clickbaits” are personified. Sometimes they are real disparities, attracting traffic by sacrificing part of their margin. Other times, with that “candy,” they bring you to their “home” and the price is no longer what it was (that famous cache…). Sometimes you arrive and the hotel is fully booked, but since you’re already “at their place,” they show you everything they have in case you want to buy something else. These are what we could call aggressive tactics, often dirty and not very honest, which mainly create confusion for the customer.
In many cases, hyperdistribution leads us to undesirable situations, making the battle even more aggressive: if you drop your price by 3, I’ll drop mine by 5, then someone else comes along and drops it by 7, and then another who, because we negotiated poorly and there’s a rebate, sells below net just to collect that rebate and make a profit. Or maybe they sell below net because you pay them a monthly “marketing” fee, and that’s where they get their margin.
Every agreement, every contract with each provider, must have a reason, an objective, and must find its place within the overall strategy to achieve the best profitability. We are the ones who have to set the pace and the limits, and if they don’t comply with what you want to do, don’t sign it, it’s not useful for you—look for another.
At The Net Revenue, we always strive for exactly that: profitability above all else. This means having a clear direct channel strategy, complemented by another that helps us reach where neither marketing nor ourselves can. But not at any cost—anything doesn’t go.
When you find yourself ready to offer your product to the market and become aware that you’re competing with others, that’s when you truly understand what strategies and tactics exist in the sector to reach where you can’t. Always giving value to your competitive advantages, with which each company goes to its own “war.” That war which sometimes goes unnoticed by customers, but on many occasions, when it becomes more “aggressive,” can leave the customer feeling overwhelmed.
We focus on achieving good results backed by decisions that are not recent, but have been studied or planned in advance. Other times, we have to be disruptive and take risks, but always based on common sense, honesty, profitability, attracting the best customer, and improving the product’s positioning. We don’t conceive Revenue Management without a marketing strategy to support the idea, and the difference between merely correct and excellent results lies in this symbiosis between the world of numbers and the world of ideas.
