NB: This is a guest article by Mark Mattson, a former university professor who writes agile software solutions for the travel industry through TravelTools, a service for destination marketers.
The current DMO technology-pricing model is killing the sector and making destination marketers increasingly irrelevant.
In question is the model where every capacity is sold as an à la carte menu item from a product catalogue.
At a time when destination marketing should be flourishing due to the marketer’s unique ability to deliver highly relevant local information to increasingly differentiated travel constituencies, technology providers seem bent on spoon-feeding capacities based solely on developer revenues.
This model is unnecessarily expensive. It also kills innovation and disenfranchises any DMO that can’t afford to keep throwing money at solutions.
Take for example multi-thousand dollar mobile apps. Not only are they way off base in terms of cost, such excesses add to the sum total of many other à la carte add-ons or sell-ups that precede it.
Worse than the bill is the fallout.
Such pricing relegates many small to medium organizations to the sidelines. While some marketers can afford to keep adding high-priced capacities, others can never hope to keep pace when the buy-in is far beyond their means.
When I see multi-thousand dollar mobile apps, I shake my head in wonder. Is this price justifiable when anyone can go on Google and come up with a dozen top quality mobile templates written by the world’s best coders and offered as free open source solutions by industry luminaries like jQuery?
Of course it isn’t.
Value versus promise
Developers need to stop forcing the market vertically through a value proposition that is based on inertia, force of habit in the market, and technical mumbo jumbo that creates the illusion of value.
If developers don’t come clean with their clients and stop treating them like ill-informed cash cows, they lose relevance.
Developers must confess that every advanced technology quickly morphs into a commodity and they can’t keep up-selling every new trend as a hedge against inevitable revenue declines from previous development cycles.
This pricing model only leads to technology inflation. It also leads to solution irrelevance since it fails to address the real needs of destination marketers who struggle to maintain their relevance in the face of onslaughts by industry giants that outspend and develop all of us.
To change course, developers must emulate Google, Facebook and Apple by pushing capacity upgrades to their communities as natural evolutions of their framework architectures. In other words, stop nickel and diming the industry at a thousand or ten thousand dollars at every turn.
If this promise is kept, if this model is emulated, the floodgates for innovation open and DMO clients maintain their competitive edges within opportunity-rich local markets. It also allows marketers wiggle room if they wish to transition from member-based to fee for marketing-based services.
Let’s use the mobile app example as a point of reference. For the sake of discussion, let’s say that $9,000 is a fair price point.
I think it stinks, but that’s irrelevant to the conversation.
What is relevant is the value that destination marketers get for their money. More specifically, does the app do its job and does it do it over and over again as the market changes.
What might the Big Boys do?
Now, I would never suggest that a $9,000 mobile app is incapable of doing a good job. It better—for that price. What I’m asking is whether it is a comprehensive mobile solution or just a beautiful one-trick pony at a time when the market demands a herd of highly individualized stallions racing out in every direction simultaneously.
If we agree that the market is increasingly personalized and that response mechanisms need to illuminate hyper-local, real time opportunities, what good is a single mobile app with a fixed focus, scale and categorization scheme?
Wouldn’t the industry be better served if developers built mobile capacity architectures that empower clients to built as many mobile apps as they liked at any scale or geographic focus?
That’s what the market needs: a mobile app making machine that grinds out custom mobile apps like links of sausage for every local event or point of interest.
Google, Bing, and Apple get it. They figured this out.
They also figured out that real opportunity comes from sharing innovation in a way that encourages developers to climb on board through architecture APIs. It doesn’t come from milking every dime out of every transaction. That model can’t be afforded or sustained.
If developers and their clients hope to maintain their relevance they need to invest less in products and more in agile framework architectures. Once scalable framework architectures are built, adding capacities such as mobile apps becomes trivial.
Furthermore, since all passengers rise simultaneously on the same boat, advanced solutions become available to individuals and organizations of all kinds and means. There can be no doubt about this.
Look at Google Maps. Ames, Iowa at 89,000 people has the exact interactive mapping potential as Los Angeles, California, at 11,000,000 because Google built a democratic architecture as opposed to a vertical market based on the ability to pay.
If destination marketers are to remain relevant in the face of personalization and multi-channel displays they need to demand a different value proposition from their technology providers.
They must insist on technology solutions that integrate feature capacities or tools into their CMS architectures.
This and this alone will flatten the technology landscape and open real opportunities - those that technology watchers and writers tell us surround trends toward multi-channel and personalized information delivery within hyper-local markets.
NB: This is a guest article by Mark Mattson, a former university professor who writes agile software solutions for the travel industry through TravelTools, a service for destination marketers.
NB2:Apple on beach image via Shutterstock.