Hotel Tech needs to move past Mousetraps

150 years ago, the saying was that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Since then we have entered an age of “mousetrap” abundance. So even the if your product is the best, nobody will ever know. The hotel tech chart more than doubled in size just the last decade. App store submissions increased by 84% with the advent of AI. Good tech isn’t the problem anymore.

In parallel, we (and the customers) are drowning in information: emails, LinkedIn, messaging apps, newsletters ad infinitum. We probably consume more information in a day than previous generations consumed in weeks, and that’s not taking account the AI slop that is coming in like a mudslide.

Customers can’t realistically shop for the best hotel tech anymore. Yes, they’re going through the process of RFPs etc. They have to. But they’re looking for the solution that will reduce effort and risk. The “don’t make me think” solution.

The stats and global advertising has now reached its highest share of GDP ever recorded, let’s just realize what that means for a moment. In the age of self-marketing and information, more money is spent on advertising than ever before, more than in the Mad Men era. Yes, we can say the cost per click went up or ad prices are going up. I think it means customer attention has become one of the scarcest resources. (If you really want to know what I think, check out my newsletter here).

In hotel tech (and probably a lot of B2B SaaS) a lot of vendors are still competing as if product quality and innovation are the primary differentiators, it isn’t. I find the McDonalds story pictured above very relevant. In the battle between the best burgers and the most distributed burgers, the latter won. And history is full of those stories.

I speak to a lot of product people, founders, CEOs, they’re busy adding (and investing into) more features, more dashboards, more AI capabilities. Yes they should, products must improve. But if you look at which SaaS companies win and which loose the winners are the ones that are strong in marketing. I once published my research on that and 44% of their costs to sales and marketing, versus 31% to product.

This has been said time and time again. I’m not making some big revelation here. But I’m surprised at how few actually believe it or at least do it. Look at hotel tech, who is winning today? Is it the ones with the best product or the ones with the best marketing. Be honest.

It is easy to brush off the winners as “they’re just selling hot air” maybe they are, but in the end they’ve got the market share and they can add features. Those still tweaking the product might have the features but no customers.

Attention is the bottleneck. There are only so many seconds a day that people pay attention to something else than what they are working on. This is the most important thing you need to understand from this. And that’s why advertising has now reached the highest share of GDP in history.

Take a good look at how many seconds or minutes a day you allocate to what is happening in your industry. Look at how limited that time is. Now figure out who is showing up and who isn’t? If you’re not showing up, you don’t exist.

Obviously one can say that I’m touting my own horn here. I am. But mostly because that’s where my experience is. I can’t comment on the importance of github or document code.

About me: I'm a fractional CMO and co-founder of the lead-gen marketing and content agency Pragmatik. We work with B2B tech companies in the travel space to build recurring marketing qualified lead strategies. So yes, of course I want people to invest in more marketing. The above however are true unbiased observations backed by real experiences.