Celebrating our recent merger with Mexico City-based Circus Marketing, a fully integrated digital agency, we’re sharing some insights relevant to the Latin American region. Circus Marketing is one of the most highly respected agencies in Latin America, and enables us to offer the best quality of talent possible for the region–helping us scale up our offering to meet the growing needs of the increasingly digitally mature region, which are discussed in detail below. You can read the following post in Spanish by clicking here, and in Portuguese here. Catch more of our latest and most exciting work from the region right here.

Latin America’s digital landscape has been growing nonstop, driven in part by the increasing availability of mobile services all across the region, where 79% of users will have broadband mobile connection by 2020. With changing user expectations and a new era of connectedness, opportunities abound for brands seeking to enter the vast LatAm market. Global companies such as Uber and Spotify have shown how far they can go: Uber’s second-biggest market after the US is Mexico, while Spotify has been the dominant paid streaming service in the region since 2013. These trends impact all industries and travel is a great example of it.

An approach like this will help brands and their partners understand human behavior and preferences to respond quickly and accurately to customer needs. The challenge today is to create human experiences without points of friction, making them as human as possible. While technology is necessary to enable such experiences, brands with true digital maturity put “emotion into the code” so interactions don’t feel robotic and merely transactional.

There is still plenty of room for designers, strategists and technologists to improve the brands’ digital offerings, digitizing and personalizing them with a human perspective to create a creatively differentiated user experience. “The challenge is the humanization of digital. Because in the end, digitization is about transforming products and services into return on investment,” says Rivera.

Digital transformation is a perpetual, never-ending process, and a focus on results is key to starting small and building toward more long-term goals. Brands can successfully begin their digital transformation journey by beginning with projects that have the highest impact on improving the customer experience or driving internal efficiency, becoming more digitally savvy in lockstep with their customers. With customer obsession leading their digital transformation strategy, brands will become well equipped to stay competitive.

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Over half of Latin American travelers use online services to research, plan and book trips – with that number continuing to climb exponentially year over year. As we detailed in our recent Travel Trends report for LatAm, travel brands in the region must embrace new digital opportunities available to offer customers seamless experiences, both online and offline, in order to compete in an increasingly competitive market.

In an environment where 67% of business customers prefer to buy through digital channels, according to Salesforce, traditional and small brands cannot afford to postpone their transition to digital any longer, or they risk losing their audience to digitally native brands. Today’s users expect to have everything in their mobile phones or computers, and if they do not get it from your brand, they will look for it elsewhere. Digital transformation has become essential for brands in the accommodation, services, loyalty and entertainment sectors of the travel industry. 

“Digitization is now part of all the travel industry verticals. Digitization is not a trend, it is a necessity,” Carlos Rivera, Consulting & Platforms Lead at MediaMonks, said as part of a panel on travel on Mexican TV network, Canal Once, last month.

Digital is the new black

Imagine wanting to book a room at a hotel your friends have widely recommended in a beautiful Caribbean beach. With your mobile phone in hand, you access the corporate website where just a single image of the hotel’s façade and a telephone number greet you. They expect you to call them not only to book a room, but even to get any information at all. Are we living in the 1940s? They just lost a customer.

The number of people travelling within and to LatAm reached 207 million in 2017, and that customer base continues to grow. That, coupled with the rising mobile phone adoption rate, provides travel brands a vital opportunity to enhance their digital services and offerings in the region. Customers today expect a connected digital experience at all times throughout the customer journey. Not getting it, or getting a poor one, will turn potential buyers away. 

To offer great digital experiences, brands must first realize how digital they truly are – or asses their digital maturity. How can a brand know if it’s ready? “To identify your correct target state and how long it will take to get there, evaluate how urgently you must change given the criticality of customer obsession and technology to your firm and how difficult that change will be considering the headwinds you’ll face in terms of company culture, executive trust, legacy systems, and regulators,” writes Laura Koetzle, Sharyn Leaver and Glenn O’Donnell in the Forrester report “The Roadmap For Delivering Customer-Obsessed IT Transformation.”

Having a website or a Facebook page alone does not make a brand digital. Brands must invest in transformation as an ongoing process that will enable connected offerings and touchpoints across platforms. Additionally, brands with lower digital maturities will need to rethink the bare essentials in how they engage with customers – for example, turning the mundane act of booking a plane ticket into an opportunity to meet someone across the world, as we did with our campaign that won Aeromexico the only Gold Cannes Lion for Mexico in 2019. Delivering such experiences seamlessly and instantaneously can require an overhaul in mindset or operations – or both.

This strategy enables brands to maintain a more customer-centric focus, gaining a more direct and closer relationship with their audience. “Digitization is increasingly present in the lives of consumers,” says Rivera. Consumers are becoming increasingly digital, and there are already so many great digital experiences out there that those with a lower digital maturity need to keep up to stay relevant.

Brands must focus not only on customer-facing technology; platforms and integrations that operate behind the scenes and under the hood impact how the business not only delivers experiences to consumers, but operates as a whole. The far-reaching influence of these technologies can make digital transformation feel like a big, unwieldy initiative. MediaMonks helps brands overcome this by focusing first on the high-priority, quick wins that fuel momentum and ladder into subsequent projects.

One quick project that focused on implementing a mature backend for a unique customer experience is the mobile assistant we made with DDB Berlin and Lufthansa, which makes travel recommendations based on a user’s immediate surroundings. We implemented a CMS that would connect user input – uploaded photos – with Google’s Cloud Vision AI service to identify objects within the photo, which then output copy about a related place. For example, a photo of headphones would recommend visiting Glasgow to hear live bagpipes. Bridging together user input with AI and Lufthansa’s own collection of destinations, the assistant takes full advantage of the power of digital in a unique way. And this is precisely the basis for customer obsession, brands using digital to fully understand their audiences, predicting their needs and delivering a satisfying and emotionally resonant experience.

Humans after all

No two travelers are alike. Even if they look for the same things while traveling, their preferences will set them apart. Many may seek a nice restaurant for dinner, but maybe one of them will want it by a beautiful seaside view, while another will prefer to look at a busy street and yet another one will want to sit away from the windows. The travel experience must be personalized based on preferences such as these. In fact, data from eMarketer shows that 69.4% of US digital marketers see demand and interest from customers being an important driver in data-driven marketing initiatives–higher than any other factor–highlighting just how important personalization is to deliver the experiences that users want.

Discover how digitization is impacting the travel industry in Latin America.

As part of our relationship with Booking.com, this meant creating dynamic video ads where content is delivered in one of 54 different permutations with Google’s Vogon technology, based on individual preferences. The dynamic video speaks directly to customers’ travel needs in how it builds a narrative, using data to offer a more human-centered message.

“The main challenge when adopting new technologies is to create new travel experiences that really connect with each user and that will have the right balance of technology with human contact. We have to humanize technology, make it intuitive, easy to use and user-centered,” says Rivera.

On this subject, Wesley ter Haar, MediaMonks Founder, says that “storytelling is a constant pursuit to identify those things that digital and interactive can provide to create imprints on memory and moments of emotional resonance – that feel personal, but remain true to what research tells us end users will respond to.”

The humanization of technology entails putting users at the very core of all experiences and products that brands have to offer. Whether starting with a user-centered UX/UI design or implementing more complex technologies such as AI or machine learning, the customer must be the main focus for everything brands do in the digital world. To truly become customer-obsessed, brands must focus their strategies and budgets “on the technologies, systems, and processes that win, serve, and retain customers,” according to Forrester.

There is one statistic that no one in the travel industry can ignore: tourism generated a revenue of US $1.7 trillion in 2018, according to the World Tourism Organization. From hotels, to casinos or airlines, the opportunities available for the myriad of players in this industry abound, and in one region in particular this is crystal clear: Latin America. In our most recent report, Destination LatAm: Trends Shaping the Travel Customer Experience in the Region, we focused on this part of the world to highlight the main trends that are shaping the present and future of tourism through a regional lens—viewed with a global perspective.

New technologies, digital transformation and disruptive new players are just some of the trends that are revolutionizing the travel industry all around the globe. But there is one thing that unites them all: a focus on delivering the best, most innovative customer experience. 

If brands want to survive in this increasingly competitive industry, they must better understand and address their customers’ needs, then deliver upon them with premier, differentiated digital experiences. But achieving this is a complex task that requires adopting new content and production strategies that are better equipped for personalization, positioned to meet users across the digital ecosystem.

Transformation is an enormous challenge not only for small, budget-limited newcomers but for established brands too. The investment needed to achieve this will test their capabilities at every level of the organization. Wanting to satisfy the customer’s needs will not be enough, as brands must develop agile processes and forge partnerships spread across the wider consumer journey to better support their users’ every travel need.

With customer experience in mind, brands can begin their digital transformation to make their travel as smooth as possible while enhancing their business.

Find out how customer experience is impacting and moving the travel industry in Latin America.

Since opening our Mexico City office last year, we take immense pride in the work we’ve done to bring regional brands’ digital efforts to a global stage. In such a short amount of time, we managed to pull off a big win not just for a client, but for the country itself: a Gold Cannes Lion awarded to Aeroméxico’s “People are the Places” website at this year’s Cannes Festival for Creativity. The victory recognizes the region’s leaps in providing premier digital experiences, as well as the power in marrying global expertise with a local team’s insights and understanding of the market.

If anyone could pull it off, it would be Aeroméxico: airlines and other travel brands in particular must understand what kind of experiences and messages resonate not just with their primary domestic market, but with international travelers as well. And as an industry leader, engaging and unique digital experiences aren’t uncommon for Aeroméxico: the airline’s app topped the download charts in the first week since its launch. 

For Aeroméxico this was new, unexplored terrain, so it was fundamental that MediaMonks provided them with all the tools, capabilities and talent to face this exciting challenge. “What we did was build a bridge between creativity and technology,” said Carlos Rivera, Consulting and Platforms Lead at MediaMonks. One of the key elements of this process was a UX expert to guide the brand’s process with the new platform. 

In creating the platform for “People are the Places”, we wanted to craft a website experience that conveyed emotion and humanity, design a story-driven interface that fostered relatability, and build a frictionless platform where users feel invited into a seamless experience. In the end, the campaign succeeded, because users truly feel as if they are traveling to someone in the process of creating their destination. 

“Our Mexico City office served as the main partner guiding Aeroméxico through the creative steps required for this campaign,” said Marcelo Planchart, MediaMonks Head of Latam Expansion. “This meant not only providing new technologies, but focusing on solutions that would directly benefit customers and make their experience rewarding in every way.” Taking home a Gold Cannes Lion, the airline has certainly taken the country to new heights–what more could an airline hope to achieve?

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But “People are the Places”–made in collaboration between Aeroméxico’s in-house team, MediaMonks and our partners at Google–is a wholly new experience. “With ‘People are the Places,’ we want to go from being a company that transports people to a brand that builds personal relationships,” said Andrés Castañeda, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience at Aeroméxico. “It is a huge satisfaction for Aeroméxico’s marketing team to win a Golden Lion with a campaign developed 100% at home in collaboration with Google.”

Born from the belief that traveling is about people more so than the destination, “People are the Places” lets travelers experience locales like never before–through the people actually living there. Through a savvy site, users can select a person as a destination, resulting in a personalized e-ticket with the name of the user and their selected person, as well as a dynamic video that stitches together social media content. This information then becomes the basis for creating an actual ticket, transforming individual people into destinations themselves. With 60% of leisure and 41% of business travelers arranging their trips online, according to Smart Insights, it becomes essential for travel industry players to accurately measure customer experience and improve their services and products, enhancing the experience itself and directly impacting their business.

It’s a unique spin that prompts people to change the way they think about destinations. An airline can’t change the geography that divides or connects people, but it can provide novel new perspectives that change the logic of how people conceptualize places. Whether seeing the world for the first time from seven miles above ground or discovering a place through a person, Aeroméxico accomplishes such a feat in more ways than one.

To help accomplish this, we worked with Aeroméxico to build a web platform that integrates Google technologies and social media tools with Aeroméxico’s ecommerce backend. Instead of choosing a geographic destination, users can instead directly choose the person they want to fly to, wherever they are in the world.

Interested in learning how MediaMonks partners with our LatAm or Mexican clients?

Bridging Together Creativity and Technology

As brands have designed digital experiences that accomplish the same KPIs and goals, most digital experiences across industries—including travel—have begun to feel the same. There is little differentiating factor in travel destination search engines, for example, resulting in a proliferation of search aggregates with which price alone becomes the deciding factor in purchasing decisions. This trend highlights the importance of digital experiences that provide an emotional value to consumers’ interactions with the brand.

At MediaMonks, we often argue that the interface is the brand, and that no interaction is too small or insignificant to reflect a brand’s product or services. MediaMonks helped Aeroméxico take advantage of high-end technology to create a user experience never seen before for selling plane tickets, offering a truly unique and human-centered process for discovering and selecting a travel destination. And it’s not just a flashy customer experience: with this, Aeroméxico now offers a new, scalable way of selling tickets, offering a 100% data-centered and personalized solution to make each flight unique and human-driven. Marrying together a delightful engagement with clear business impact demonstrates the brand’s role as a major digital player in the industry.

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