In my first 3 posts I was talking about the concept of how education can elevate your position in the market. I have used consultants as examples, I have used Indian brands also. Yesterday I wrote about a French perfume company. Today I will talk about an internationally well known tourism industry brand Trip Advisor.

The best thing about TripAdvisor is that it never tries to sell you anything. You can go look at people’s reviews of hotels, places etc. You can figure out what people liked about a place, what were the best spots etc. All of this is very conveniently put up front. As a matter of fact if you will search about a given location or a hotel in a location – you will typically find Trip Advisor in the top 10 searches on Google. And this inspite of the fact that most of the other search results will talk about the cheapest fares etc.

Initially I used to look at the Trip Advisor ratings for a hotels. What were the other travellers talking about. Slowly I got hooked to the idea of going to the site for everything when I was planning a trip to a place which I had not visited in many many years.

Trip Advisor has a sister site called Viator. So while I was searching for the best places to visit, tickets and other possibilities in New York I also got an option to buy the Travel Pass from them. Guess what, I bought it from them.

If you go on the web to search, you would get a lot of deals giving the same pass at lower rates. But because Trip Advisor has created such a trust relationship because of their education and unbiased user reviews, I didn’t think of even looking for lower options. Now its a standard practice for me to see what Trip Advisor or Viator are offering , what are the user ratings and then buying it from there.

Now does it mean that everyone who comes on the TripAdvisor site also ends up buying from them or their sister site. Absolutely not. And that would be true of all education based methodologies. Not everyone will buy from you. But that would be true for any methodology / positioning that you use. You could choose to have the lowest cost methodology for your positioning, but you would still not get the whole market to yourself. These companies differentiate themselves with the education they offer and create what Jay Abraham calls as position of Pre-Eminence.

Since I like to work with and give business to people I trust, all the examples I have given, till date ,are of companies that have used education to create that trust with me.

Till next time then. See how you can use education to create a marketing pull for your product or service.

Carpe Diem!!!