• by Harvey Chipkin , Columnist, July 20, 2015

In the last decade or so, companies like H&M and Zara have revolutionized the fashion retail business by introducing something called fast fashion, where the inventory in stores is changed constantly. Rather than the old-fashioned system, where sweaters would show up in department stores in July in anticipation of fall weather, fashions would change constantly based on what customers were buying that day and other factors.

Can that fast fashion approach work for travel? Anil Kaul thinks so and he believes he has the product that can make it work. Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata, has a product called the Navik Concept Test, which allows marketers to test promotions and other marketing initiatives in two to four weeks, rather than the months it might take otherwise. In the process it eliminates much of the human element usually involved in creating packages or other travel products. 

“The idea,” explains Kaul, “is that you can get test results very quickly because, as in fashion, it’s important to keep your travel product fresh depending on constantly hanging conditions. We can test in different ways — text, photos, videos. We recruit a targeted group — and we have partnerships that afford us access to a number of databases — with specific questions. The data gets collected, analyzed and produces results quickly so the marketer gets a “go” or “no” decision. 

“What we have brought to this is analytical intelligence,” said Kaul. “Before, you needed an experienced market researcher to design a test. With this, you can be a hotel general manager, take a half hour to set up a test and choose an audience. Very quickly, you get your answer,”

Kaul had several examples of how the test might be used:

• A big hotel chain that runs promotions regularly and always needs to decide what should be part of the offering — free night, free merchandise, etc. 

• A cruise line that launched a ship with multiple restaurants uses the test to decide on the type of restaurants they should have.

• Hotel loyalty program to decide on what rewards people prefer.

“Hotels and other suppliers have to be bringing new stuff all the time,” said Kaul, “and now they can do it at a very low cost. It’s even affordable for a single hotel.”

So here’s another tool that claims to be able to automate what has been a discipline calling for a specialist. It’s similar to revenue management, where the last decade has seen a proliferation of automated tools — but no consensus on which ones work best and how much human intervention is still required.

Whether or not this particular tool is the right way to go, the idea that travel preferences change at the speed of fashion tastes is certainly one worth considering. Marketers should think about how they might use that idea in whatever marketing they do. This might be a way to rethink how quickly you should get new products to market — and how regularly you should refresh your products.

 Prepared properly, fast marketing might be a lot healthier than fast food.