Expedia Group, the online travel firm that owns brands like Travelocity and Hotels.com as well as its eponymous website, is taking a more holistic approach to marketing that can optimise its activity across its entire portfolio.

Peter Kern, CEO of Expedia Group, discussed this topic on a quarterly conference call with investors – and revealed that the silos placed between its brands are being erased.

“We have operated as [separate] brands for a long time. And, beginning last week, we are operating as one retail-facing organisation,” Kern said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Expedia Group plans complete marketing “reset” for the recovery.)

“As our own brands competed – whether that was broadly or locally – we were creating our own dynamics in the marketplace that probably were never fully understood.”

That situation will change in Expedia’s new playbook. “We will have a marketing group that is focused entirely on marketing the whole suite of brands in the most effective way possible all over the globe,” Kern said.

Removing former boundaries could yield obvious efficiencies in terms of cost and eradicate needless duplication, but the benefits run much deeper.

The newly integrated marketing team, for instance, can invest in ways that deliver a win–win scenario across Expedia’s portfolio and, at the same time, avoid a damaging zero-sum game.

“We think that our marketing teams will have a great opportunity to stop competing with each other and start optimising for the group of brands instead of for a single brand against another,” Kern said.

This shift forms part of a wider rethink in Expedia’s marketing strategy, and has been expedited by the current crisis, as business as usual is no longer an option.

“While we don’t have the volumes to test it right now, we do have an opportunity of an entire reset, because we’ve essentially gone to virtually no marketing,” said Kern.

“And, as we wade back in, we’ll be able to be more precise, be more constrained, watch and learn, and grow into it, and not just dive back in head first and spend back to the levels we were at.”

Sourced from WARC