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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A fresh look into understanding your prospective customer's buying decisions to influence them and win more business
Building on the groundbreaking success of the first edition, this newly revised and updated version of Buyer Personas enables marketers to stop wasting time and resources on their best guesses and start drilling down to understand what buyers truly care about—then harness this newfound knowledge to create strategies and messages that break through the clutter and reach buyers on their level.
In a world where buyers frequently struggle to get the information they need to evaluate competitive alternatives and feel confident in their choices, this book lays out a step-by-step approach used by hundreds of companies to understand what buyers want to know and experience as they search for a solution to meet their needs, weigh their options, and make a buying decision. In this book, you'll learn:
- Why understanding the buying decision is far more important than knowing a few things about the individuals or roles involved in that decision
- How to develop a modern Buyer Persona based on five types of buying insights that will inform nearly every marketing and sales decision you make
- Why interviewing recent buyers is the best way to develop your Buyer Persona and how to do it effectively
- How to use AI and quantitative survey research to enhance your Buyer Persona
- Ways to use Buyer Persona insights to increase awareness of your products and services, drive consideration, and convert more business
The revised and expanded Buyer Personas is a complete guide to go beyond benefit-heavy, undifferentiated marketing and focus only on what buyers care about most. It earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, and other business professionals looking to influence their prospective buyers.
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Seitenzahl: 309
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Listen First, Then Speak
Understanding Your Buyer's Story
More Than Just a Profile of Your Prospective Buyers
Will This Approach Work for You?
How the Book Is Organized and What's New
PART I: The Art and Science of Buyer Personas
1 Understanding Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them
Where Buyer Profiles Fall Short
What a Family Vacation Can Teach Us About the Buying Decision
Focus Your Buyer Personas on the Buying Decision
High-consideration Buying Decisions
Multiple Stages in the Buying Journey
Types of Buying Insights Needed
Next Steps
2 Focus on Insights That Guide Marketing and Sales Enablement
A Unique Opportunity
Why Interested Buyers Don't Buy
What the Best Sellers Do to Overcome Buyer Indecision
The Marketer's Opportunity and a Dilemma
5 Rings of Buying Insight Define Your Buyer Persona
3 Decide How You Will Discover Buyer Persona Insights
A Straightforward Approach to a Complex Question
Is This Another Kind of Qualitative Research?
Using Salespeople to Build Buyer Personas
Survey Research Will Enhance Your Buyer Personas
How Social Media Contributes to Buyer Personas
How Does AI Fit In?
PART II: Interviewing for Buying Insights
4 Setting Up Your Buyer Persona Study
Persuade Stakeholders That You Need Buying Insights, Not “Buyer Personas”
Overcome the “We Know Our Buyers” Objection
When You Don't Have Time for Buyer Persona Interviews
How to Design Your Buyer Persona Study
Buyer Persona Case Study: Buying an MRI Machine
5 Gain Permission and Schedule Buyer Interviews
Use Your Sales Database to Find Buyers to Interview
Sometimes You Want to Avoid Your Internal Database
Using Professional Recruiters to Set Interview Appointments
Which Buyer Should You Interview?
Interview Buyers Who Chose You as Well as Those Who Didn't
Contacting Buyers to Request an Interview
6 Conduct Probing Buyer Interviews
Who Should Conduct the Interview?
Prepare for Your Buyer Interview
Get It on the Record
“Take Me Back to the Day …”
Case Study: An Example Interview with Tim
Look for Insight When Buyers Use Jargon
Make Your Questions About Your Impact Count
Probing on Who Influences the Decision
Asking About the Perceived Value of Your Differentiators
When Features Affect Decisions, Look for Insight
Be a Respectful Listener
PART III: Creating Your Buyer Persona
7 Mine Your Interviews for Buying Insights
You Need Fewer Interviews Than You Think
Steps for Developing Buying Insights from Your Interviews
Using AI to Mine Your Interviews for Insights
8 Communicate Buying Insights for Impact
Presenting the 5 Rings of Buying Insight to Others
Building the Buyer Profile
Identify Top Themes That Will Resonate with Buyers
9 Conduct Survey Research to Enhance Buying Insights
Ways to Enhance Your Buyer Persona with Survey Research
Who Should You Survey?
PART IV: Aligning Your Strategies to Win More Business
10 Decide What to Say to Buyers
Will Your Current Approach Work?
Hold a Messaging Strategy Workshop
11 Adjust Strategies to Deliver the Knowledge and Experience Buyers Want
Empathize with Buyers Through Priority Initiatives
Build Buyer Trust and Confidence Through Success Factors
Differentiate Through Perceived Barriers
Answer Important Buyer Questions Through Decision Criteria
Design Marketing Activities to Enable Your Buyer's Journey
Prioritize Assets That Align with the Buyer's Journey
Changing the Conversation with Salespeople
Share Insights, Not Buyer Personas
Deliver Buying Insights Through Sales Playbooks
12 Start Small, with an Eye to the Future
Where to Begin Your Buyer Persona Initiative
How to Earn Your Stripes as a Strategic Resource
Communicating Insights That Affect Other Teams
Using Buyer Personas to Guide Strategic Planning
Start Small and Make a Difference
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Example Buyer Profile.
Figure 1.2 Family vacation requirements.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Breakdown of losses to inaction by root cause.
Figure 2.2 Impact of relitigating the status quo with indecisive buyers.
Figure 2.3 5 Rings of Buying Insight.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Closed MRI machine.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Example probes on jargon responses.
Figure 6.2 Example probes on “It was too expensive.”
Figure 6.3 Example probes on “missing feature” responses.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.2 Insights Aggregator spreadsheet.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 MRI machine Priority Initiatives summary.
Figure 8.2 MRI machine Success Factors summary.
Figure 8.3 MRI machine Perceived Barriers summary.
Figure 8.4 MRI machine Decision Criteria summary – page 1.
Figure 8.5 MRI machine Decision Criteria summary – page 2.
Figure 8.6 MRI machine Buyer's Journey summary – page 1.
Figure 8.7 MRI machine Buyer's Journey summary – page 2.
Figure 8.8 MRI machine Priority Initiatives Buyer Quotes example.
Figure 8.9 MRI machine Decision Criteria Buyer Quotes example.
Figure 8.10 MRI machine Buyer Profile.
Figure 8.11 MRI machine message themes that will resonate with buyers – page...
Figure 8.12 MRI machine message themes that will resonate with buyers – page...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Example question to determine Success Factors importance.
Figure 9.2 Example choice-based question to determine Decision Criteria impo...
Figure 9.3 Example results for MRI machine Decision Criteria ranking.
Figure 9.4 Example results for MRI machine Decision Criteria chip allocation...
Figure 9.5 Example of segmented results for MRI machine Decision Criteria ch...
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Listen First, Then Speak
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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JIM KRAUS AND ADELE REVELLA
BUYER PERSONASREVISED AND EXPANDED
GAIN DEEP INSIGHT INTO YOUR CUSTOMERS' BUYING DECISIONS AND WIN MORE BUSINESS
Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial technologies or similar technologies.
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COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHYCOVER IMAGE: © GETTY IMAGES | MICHAEL BLANN
This book is dedicated to every marketer who questions the wisdom of making stuff up.
Introduction: Listen First, Then Speak
A lot has changed in the marketing world since the first edition of Buyer Personas was published in 2015.
Digital marketing has continued its rise as the Internet, social media, and mobile technology are deeply embedded and interconnected in how we live our lives and how we look for solutions to meet our varied needs.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has become more sophisticated as brands compete to capture their customers' attention and engage with them in more productive ways when they do.
Marketers are increasingly using data to personalize their campaigns as advertising, product recommendations, and tailored content have all become more sophisticated.
Companies are experimenting (and having success) with emerging approaches such as account-based marketing (ABM) and product-led growth (PLG).
Generative AI (GenAI) is changing the way marketers develop ideas and create engaging content more quickly at scale.
Throw in the rise of video marketing, user-generated content (UGC), interactive content, voice search optimization, and on and on – and well, you get the picture.
Undoubtedly, as some of these approaches gain traction and evolve, others will die off without demonstrable results, and new methods of engaging with prospective buyers will emerge. The one thing that hasn't changed – or ever will – is the need for marketers to deeply understand what causes buyers to purchase your solution, a competitor's products, or nothing at all. With this knowledge, marketers have everything they need to influence buyers and generate more revenue and profits for their organization. Without this knowledge, it's guessing and hoping for the best (not a great long-term strategy).
The purpose of this revised and expanded edition of Buyer Personas is to show you exactly how to take all the guesswork out of your marketing. Regardless of your strategy du jour, a Buyer Persona is the foundation of your marketing house from which you can erect the framing, hang the drywall, and add the plumbing and electricity. It will inform nearly every marketing and sales decision you make and provide you a distinct advantage because you will know the who, what, where, and why your prospective customers make the buying decisions that they do in a way that your competitors can't match.
Understanding Your Buyer's Story
“So, what brings you in here to see me?”
That question is spoken countless times every day in doctor's offices, car repair shops, bank loan offices, law firms, and hundreds of other professional establishments. What usually follows that question is the customer's narrative describing their problem.
“My daughter is entering college next year and I want to explore loan options for her education.”
“It's probably nothing, doctor, but I've been wondering about a small change I've noticed recently …”
“The engine has been making the strangest sound when I drive downhill. It all started right after I loaned the car to my brother-in-law, who said he used it to move his large collection of Civil War cannon balls.”
“I'm concerned that my cat has been pacing back and forth at night and making very loud howls.”
Listening is an essential part of any first meeting. It's how professionals learn about their customers' concerns, goals, and expectations so that they can present a relevant solution.
Yet in many organizations this one-to-one communication between marketing professionals and their customers is infrequent – if it happens at all.
How often do you have an opportunity to listen to your customers describe their problems? Do you know how to ask the questions that will make this conversation valuable for you and your customer? And most important, do you know how to apply what you've heard to become a more effective marketer?
The art and science of asking probing questions and carefully listening to your customers' responses lie at the core of the Buyer Persona concept. It's the key to discovering their mindsets and the motivation that prompts them to purchase a solution like yours.
One marketing professional confessed to us after conducting their first buyer interview, “This is almost like cheating; like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customer wants – I realize how they go about it.”
This is the power of the Buyer Persona. Built around a story about your customers' buying decision, the Buyer Persona reveals insight into your buyer's expectations and concerns as they look for options, winnow down their choices, and make a decision.
This book will show you how you can listen to your buyers' stories to gain insight into the factors that trigger their search, how they define success, and what affects their final decision that a particular approach is the best one for them. We'll show you how the buyer's personal narrative reveals language and phrases that will resonate with other buyers with similar concerns and how to define and focus on the activities that compel buyers to take action. You will see how giving buyers the clearly articulated information they seek, in the language they understand, when and where they need it, is the essence of effective marketing.
More Than Just a Profile of Your Prospective Buyers
In the simplest terms, Buyer Personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them. During the past few decades, the term has almost become a marketing mantra.
But as this book will show, the growing interest in Buyer Personas has resulted in confusion about how they are created, how they are used, and their ultimate effectiveness.
It's the intention of this book to provide some much-needed clarity.
The marketer's need to understand their market is hardly new. But the depth of insight required is increasing exponentially as technological advances demand that organizations rethink how they sell everything from music and books to bulldozers and information technology. A client at one of the world's leading software firms described it this way: “What we are selling is changing; who we are selling to is changing (some are people we've never sold to before); and how these customers want to be engaged, marketed, and sold to is changing too.”
Buyer Personas have a lot to do with attaining that kind of alignment, but not in the way that marketers often use them, which is basically to build a profile of the people who are their intended customers. Rather, the contention of this book is that when Buyer Personas evolve from authentic stories related by actual buyers – in the form of one-on-one interviews – the methodology and presentation allow you to capture the buyer's expectations and the factors that influence them. Then, and only then, can you truly stand in your buyers' shoes and consider the buying decision from the buyer's point of view. This goes way beyond buyer profiling, but most marketers don't realize that.
Not long ago, we met with executives from a large corporation who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for research on “Buyer Personas” that were essentially worthless. The company had purchased profiles about the people who buy, but these failed to capture the crucially important stories revealing how buyers make this type of decision. We've also seen companies purchase over-segmented research that defined dozens of Buyer Personas, a number that would be feasibly impossible for them to tailor their marketing with any effectiveness.
In both of these cases, the company had lost its way by focusing on the goal to build Buyer Personas without a clear plan to ensure that they contain useful findings.
Naturally, it's far easier to make educated guesses and assumptions about what buyers may be thinking based on extrapolations of your own knowledge or intuition. That's certainly how large aspects of the marketing community have functioned for decades. But the climate of social and technological change favors companies that embrace a culture of buyer understanding that allows them to adapt to customer needs. Just consider the major technology players that have receded or disappeared: AOL, Digital, Polaroid, Wang, AltaVista, Netscape, Fairchild Semiconductor, Palm, Sun Microsystems. The list could run for pages. Each of these companies was outrun by competitors who possessed greater clarity about their buyers' expectations.
Will This Approach Work for You?
This book is for marketing professionals who want to avoid that kind of dire scenario, whether they work in the business-to-business (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. It is specifically aimed at marketers of “high-consideration” products, services, and solutions – buying decisions that require a considerable investment of your buyers' thought and time. Examples of high-consideration decisions range from selecting the right vendor of capital equipment, or picking which college to attend, to carefully choosing a new car, or the most appropriate location for office space. This decision-making process differs markedly from impulse purchases made in a grocery store or at the checkout register.
When you consider that we want to interview buyers to capture their story, it is easy to understand why a detailed narrative about a choice between new automobiles would be immensely useful. In contrast, little insight would be gained as a result of asking a buyer to explain why they decided to purchase a particular pack of gum.
Although the Internet and artificial intelligence (AI) more recently have given us instant access to immense knowledge, even the most sophisticated applications won't reveal what you can learn by listening to your buyer's stories. Just as there is nothing to acquaint you with a foreign culture as intimately as staying with a native family in their home, the best way to gain deep insight into your buyer's mindset is to spend quality time with them.
The Buyer Persona methodology outlined in this book will help companies avoid the consequences that inevitably engulf organizations that fail to listen intensely to their buyers. In the pages to come, we will explain how you can use Buyer Personas to craft successful marketing strategies based on insight that would otherwise be nearly impossible to acquire. We will show how this can be done without exorbitant investments in money, time, or labor. It just requires adhering to a well-defined process, mastering a few skills, and honing your analytical thinking. This is a craft and a set of skills that can be learned, and this book will serve as your primer for how you or your organization can achieve this.
How the Book Is Organized and What's New
We've organized the book into four parts.
In Part I, you'll learn what a Buyer Persona is, and what it is not. You'll find out why so many Buyer Personas are not as useful as they should be, and what you need to do to ensure the success of your Buyer Persona initiative. In this updated edition, you'll also get an inside look at how one of the authors chose a vacation destination that demonstrates the importance of understanding the buying decision and why it should be the cornerstone of your Buyer Persona.
In Part II, we'll get into the nitty-gritty of how to find, recruit, and conduct buyer interviews so they reveal everything you need to know to develop your Buyer Persona. We've added an entirely new chapter that provides detailed guidance about how to design and set up your Buyer Persona study for success. We'll also introduce you to a Buyer Persona we developed (for magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] machines) and use it throughout the book so you can see how one step in a persona study leads to the next.
Part III focuses on mining your interviews for Buying Insights and creating Buyer Personas that will be easily understood and widely leveraged across your organization. We've also added a new chapter on conducting survey research to enhance the Buying Insights from your persona.
Finally, in Part IV, we'll share step-by-step guidance about how to use Buyer Personas to define your marketing strategies. You'll learn how to rely on Buyer Persona insights to develop your messaging and marketing activities to align with your sales organization, and in the final chapter, we'll recommend a place to begin and explain our vision for the future role of Buyer Personas.
We are excited that you share our interest in Buyer Personas and hope that this updated and expanded version of the book will help you join the growing ranks of buyer-expert marketers.
PART IThe Art and Science of Buyer Personas
Ask someone in marketing what a “Buyer Persona” is and more likely than not they are going to say something such as:
“It's a fictional archetype of a
functional role
or
title
including their interests, values, challenges, and priorities.”
“It's a profile of a
person
including demographics such as age, gender, income, occupation, and location.”
“It's a detailed description of
someone
who represents your target audience or ideal customer.”
These answers aren't terribly surprising given that virtually anyone associated with the craft of marketing has written, spoken, or referenced Buyer Personas in exactly such a way over the past 20–30 years. And we know that there are literally hundreds of organizations (probably thousands!) that have developed “Buyer Personas” just like this to attract and win more business.
Unfortunately, many of these organizations have also come to realize that this type of audience-based Buyer Persona – one that profiles an individual or role – provides little to no insight into what influences a prospective customer's buying decision. This type of persona may give you a general sense of a particular role involved in the buying decision – who they are and what they care about in broad terms – but it omits critical insights that marketers need to help their organizations attract and convert more business, including:
What triggers a prospective buyer to start looking for a particular solution that you offer in the first place?
What specific outcomes do buyers expect from making an investment in this solution?
What fears, concerns, and trepidations do buyers have about making this investment, or making it with you?
What questions will buyers ask as they figure out what providers and solutions to consider, winnow down their choices, and make a final decision?
What are the key steps in the buyer's journey? Who is involved in the process? What information sources do they use and trust?
Organizations that rely on profiles of different individuals or roles involved in the buying decision often end up developing too many personas that overcomplicate their strategies and messaging and fail to connect with buyers in ways that inspire trust and make them confident in their buying decisions.
Fortunately, there is better way, and we'll spend the majority of this book describing exactly how to develop Buyer Personas that reveal deep insight into the who, what, where, and why buyers make the buying decisions that they do. This type of buying decision-based persona will take all the guesswork out of your marketing activities so the wind is continuously at your back as you strive to deeply connect with buyers.
In this first part of the book, we are going to focus on three foundational elements of a Buyer Persona:
Why a Buyer Persona based on insights into the buying decision is vastly superior to a profile of an individual or role that may be involved in it.
The five types of Buying Insight you need for your Buyer Persona and why each is important.
Why one-on-one interviews with buyers are by far the best way to create your Buyer Personas.
Once we've established these core tenets, the rest of the book will get into the nitty-gritty of how you can develop Buyer Personas that will become the definitive source for what your prospective buyers need to know and experience to make a confident buying decision about a solution that you offer. These Buyer Personas create alignment across the organization and will quickly become the unifying “voice of the buyer” that points everyone in the optimal direction.
1Understanding Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them
In some marketing courses and websites, Buyer Personas are defined as something similar to Figure 1.1.
Here we see John, a fictional archetype who is meant to represent a typical Operations Manager. The graphic outline gives us information about John's education, age, to whom he reports, his skills, the incentives and rewards from his job (keeping his job and an occasional raise), and how he spends his free time (family, church, a weekly poker game with his friends); plus, how he stays current on the latest trends in his industry, broken down into four categories. This is a Buyer Profile that is heavy on data that could be readily gleaned from online research, social media, artificial intelligence (AI), and other sources.
The Buyer Profile has gained a lot of traction because it is a useful tool to help you think about your target buyers as real people, with actual families, typical bosses, and human concerns. For the same reason that we find it far easier to communicate via social media when we have a photograph of a person we have never met in person, the Buyer Profile creates a sense of the human connection with people whom we have never met face-to-face. If you've ever built a relationship with someone through social media, you may have noticed that your first in-person encounter feels a lot like running into an old friend. The photograph and details of this person's job or personal life have likely shaped your interactions and created a sense of intimacy despite the fact that you live and work in very different circumstances.
Figure 1.1 Example Buyer Profile.
Where Buyer Profiles Fall Short
While a Buyer Profile has value for marketers – and it should be part of your Buyer Persona – it tells us nothing about how buyers make a buying decision. We see John reads industry publications, belongs to industry trade groups, and uses the Internet when searching for solutions. Alas, the same could be said for about 99% of other business professionals working at a comparable managerial level.
Let's say John is looking for a new logistics management supplier. From this template, what do we know about what's motivating John to find a new supplier? What does he expect to be different once he makes this switch? What is very important to John about the appearance of the packaging and enclosures in the shipments sent to retailers? What does John dislike about a lot of the providers he has used in the past?
Marketers hoping to interest John in their logistics services using just his Buyer Profile template won't find much useful intelligence here. Instead, they would need to use this profile to imagine (guess?) how John would respond to their messaging when sitting at his desk.
It's difficult to imagine how this approach to Buyer Personas will help marketers of logistics solutions know what they need to do to help John see their solution as a perfect fit for his needs. Further, it is unlikely that this company's marketers will use this tool to persuade their internal stakeholders that a different approach to their messaging and marketing activities will set their merchandise or services apart from their competition.
Buyer Profiles will not transform this marketer's ability to think like John. But suppose you knew what John is looking for when he is considering signing a contract with a new provider, why he has been dissatisfied with other providers in the past, and a score of other specific details about how John makes his decision. And suppose that these actionable details are things that neither you, nor your own salespeople, nor the competition has ever heard before. These are the types of Buying Insights that will give you clear guidance for the decisions you need to make to win John's business.
What a Family Vacation Can Teach Us About the Buying Decision
For the remainder of this chapter, we are going to take you through a first-person account of an actual buying decision I recently went through. Doing so will:
Show you why it's so important for marketers to understand the mindset and steps that buyers take when making a buying decision, and
Introduce you to the types of Buying Insights that should be part of your Buyer Persona.
Some Background
Every year, my extended family and I go on vacation together. Everyone goes – spouses, kids, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. I think someone even brought their pet turtle one year. Point is, there's a lot of us and it's a trip everyone looks forward to and plans their schedules around. We always have a great time and return home relaxed, refreshed, and grateful for the time together.
To keep things interesting, we pick a different location each year and one member of the family is randomly chosen as the “Squad Leader” for that trip. He or she chooses the destination, a place to stay, and some fun activities we can all do together. Once we get back from a trip, planning for the next one starts shortly after.
Such was the case early last year when we had just returned from one of these trips and it was time to randomly select the Squad Leader for our next adventure. I won't divulge the scientific way we do this, but there's a hat and pieces of paper involved.
Now, I can't speak for other members of my family, but my thinking at that exact moment went something like this:
Super – we had such a great time on the last trip, I can't wait to see where we go next!
I hope we go to Europe, or maybe some place more tropical, or even a part of the U.S. where we've never been
.
Maybe we can try Yellowstone, Zion or one of the other National Parks. We've never done that before
.
Please, oh please, oh please, don't pick me as the Squad Leader!
I think I make reasonably good decisions most of the time, but organizing a trip like this for so many people is not exactly in my wheelhouse, particularly when our past trips have been so successful. And, since I've perfected my role as a benign and supportive attendee, I didn't see any reason to mess with leadership responsibilities now.
By my telling this story, you can probably guess that my name did come out of that hat, which meant I needed to start planning for our next trip right away. I figured my chances of pulling this off were at least fifty-fifty. I mean, if humankind can put a person on the moon, split the atom, and raise pyramids from the sand, I can certainly plan a week's vacation for one eager, if not occasionally judgmental family!
My Mindset
Since every Squad Leader needs a clear set of objectives, I started thinking about what I wanted out of this trip. I envisioned new adventures where everyone had a great time and experienced a few things they had never done before. I pictured a lot of family-time together, talking, laughing, and catching up on each other's lives. I also wanted everyone to have a chance to relax and recharge from the day-to-day pressures of life.
These were broad aspirations, and I was a bit anxious, so I took a minute to jot down a few specific requirements that I thought would help me focus – see Figure 1.2.
The Initial Search
To reduce the initial ocean of possibilities, I decided to focus on warm, tropical locations. We had been to a colder climate on our last trip, so a warmer venue would be a welcome change. And, since we roughed it a bit last time – camping, hiking, kayaking – I decided to focus on resort hotels where we could all relax at a more leisurely pace and enjoy some of the finer amenities that these destinations offer.
Figure 1.2 Family vacation requirements.
From there, I asked for advice from friends and did a little online research – mainly visiting different travel and resort websites. The websites gave me an initial feel for what each resort offered, including rooms, dining options, beachfront property, pools, activities, excursions, and spa facilities. I also got a preliminary sense of price for each one.
Based on these inputs, I narrowed it down to three resorts that had the main things I was looking for and were within the budget range my family had agreed upon.
On a scale of 1 (panicked) to 10 (very confident), my comfort level was about 3 at that point. I realize that's a low level of confidence, but this is an important trip for my family, and I didn't want to be THE ONE to mess it up!
Evaluating Options
My next step was to dig in and investigate each resort more closely. I never expressly stated this to anyone (maybe not even myself!), but my two overarching questions at that point were:
Which resort has the best chance of providing us with all the things
we
want?
Which resort has the least likelihood of failing
me
in some way?
The first question was impersonal and objective. All I needed to do was investigate the resorts one-by-one to see what each of them offered and make my assessment.
The second question was highly personal. I needed to eliminate any chance of something falling short of expectations (that I would be blamed for!). Things like dirty rooms, bad service, poor food quality, and unanticipated expenses were all top of mind.
