Please watch the event clip here.

Stephan, Agustin and Simon	Mayumi and Rie	Andrew and Marco

 

ALTO chose to invite a pricing expert to present at its last event of the year and Marco Bertini impressed all with his succinct yet broad-ranging analysis of the politics of price.

Using many real-life examples of pricing genius and catastrophe drawn from various countries around the world, Bertini compelled delegates to consider the folly of basing marketing around price and only price.

In a saturated marketplace such as language travel, brands need to take care not to use price as a positioning statement, he counseled. "If the industry gets too commoditised, it doesn’t help anyone.”

Bertini also provided fascinating examples of how in some industries, a radical rethink of what you are charging customers for has happened. In the dynamite industry, faced with a cheaper Bolivian competitor, a leading dynamite brand started charging based on the size of fragments created rather than per dynamite stick – emphasizing its greater effectiveness in explosions.

What should language schools charge for – the week’s tuition? Or the outcome or experience, he challenged?

When it comes to managing price competition, Bertini was clear that a price war rewards no-one, and that a customer will always expect the same "one-time” discount that they have received previously from a company trying to match the competition on price. "It takes five minutes to reduce your price and five years to raise it,” he said.

Instead, Bertini gave other examples of how some supermarkets manage the discount game – creating their own "low-budget” range. And he provided insight into shopping habits too… customers may be happy to "trade up” when they can, happily spending on a deluxe handbag and economizing in other areas to offset the cost, for example. So the ideal was to offer two products covering both low and high cost bases.

And the way price is presented has to be considered: Overall, price had to be presented to be an incentive, convey information about the product at the same time, and to stir emotion. A great promotional example was a successful "super summer” campaign for discounted holidays that encouraged early booking, was only applicable to parents and made them feel rewarded (the ad played on a superhero theme) for saving the family summer holiday.

Delegates responded warmly to the session, resulting one of the highest scores amongst ALTO guest speakers with 92% of the audience rating Marco excellent or very good. Please log in to the members’ area on the webpage where you can download Marco’s slides and watch the whole seminar under Document Store menu item. As a taster, please watch our short interview with Marco here.

We look forward to seeing you at our 2013 events, more details on speakers will be announced soon. 

Declan and Adrienne	Marco Bertini	Linda and Paul

Luis Huete Keynote Speaker

Gizelle Rezende, Mauro Biondi, Andrew Mangion and Michael Xuereb

Stephan Roussounis and Susan Goldstein

Businesses should rethink their strategy every 7 years, and those that are members of ALTO may well be acting upon this advice after another successful seminar delivered by Luis Huete last week. 

Huete, a business expert and resident professor at IESE Business School in Spain, spent a day with ALTO members in London exploring successful business strategies that focus on keeping the customer at the epicentre of business decisions. "Proximity is power", counselled the award-winning speaker, who advised delegates that being good was not enough to stand out in a crowded marketplace. 

He explained that businesses should strive to achieve loyalty not satisfaction, seeking to excite or enamour their audience. To keep a business growing, passion, service and quality had to be maintained, which could call for a re-think in approach every 7 years. 

Keeping staff happy was also important. With the epithet, "Front line is bottom line", he explained how disenchanted staff quickly led to eroding customer satisfaction and declining profits. 

Topics such as price positioning (brands can consider separate divisions catering to clientele with different budgets) and product differentiation were addressed; one idea for successful differentiation was bundling products together to create packages that offer value at little extra cost. 

With a wide-ranging business insight, Huete encouraged group discussions and wider debates about industry issues such as direct bookings, the brand value of education agencies and comparisons made with the travel agency sector.

Systems were important, he said, in building consistent customer service. Huete also challenged delegates to consider the relationships their businesses had with other stakeholders; students, governments, agencies or schools, and to consider if they were defensive or synergistic. Those that prospered, he said, would be adept at building allegiance and links within their own industry eco-system. 

72 ALTO members attended the day-long seminar and 78% said Huete was excellent or very good with 72% choosing excellent or very good for take-home value. ALTO members will soon receive the link to the video recording of the whole seminar. Registration is now open to the next event: ALTO Day Berlin 2012, featuring "Pricing for Profit" by Marco Bertini Professor at London Business School, we hope to see you there!

Please watch our members' comments about the London seminar on vimeo:

Jan Capper, IALC
Stephan Roussounis, Stafford House
Anastassia Romanenko, Insight- Lingua
Rory Wilkinson, ISIS Education & Travel 

Tony Evans and Susan Goldstein	Nicola Hancox, Victoria Power and Celestine Rowland	Johan Asplund, Stefan Engstrom, Patrick Thebing and Alberto Sarno

 

Delegates attending the ALTO Montreal event hosted by ICEF North America in April were treated to a professional development seminar by world renowned leadership expert Liz Wiseman. Entitled "Multipliers- How the best leaders make everyone smarter” professionals in the language travel industry were challenged by Wiseman to amplify the talent of the people around them.  Wiseman is the author of the bestselling book, Multipliers-how the best leaders make everyone smarter, and is president of the Wizeman group- a leadership and research development firm in Silicone Valley. She is a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and can boast an impressive list of companies she has coached including Apple, Nike and Microsoft.   ALTO board member David Brown opened the session by reaffirming ALTO’s commitment to bring together the leaders of the language travel industry to offer networking opportunities, professional development and to exchange information to build the international reputation of the industry.
Wiseman then drew on her experience of working with executives from around the world to inspire delegates toward that mission. She started off the seminar by asking them to reflect on their own leadership style to determine if they are a multiplier- someone who makes their team feel smarter and more capable,  or a diminisher- someone who might be a clever leader, but who diminishes the intelligence of their employees.  She emphasised the latent talent in every organisation and showed the attendees how to use their own talent to bring out the genius in others, to challenge and encourage debates, to ask the impossible and to give employees permission to fail.  The art of managing, says Wiseman, is knowing how to ask questions that make people around you think. From her extensive research of 150 leaders in 35 companies worldwide Wiseman has found that the common denominator among multipliers is intellectual curiosity- asking questions that continuously challenge people.
Turning those questions into prepared, productive debate is another key strategy to engage employees. Wiseman encourages leaders to not make all the decisions, but rather ask questions, ask for evidence, ask everyone and ask for at least one person to switch her position on the issue in order to foster solution finding debates.  Wiseman incorporated dynamic and engaging activities throughout the seminar to demonstrate her points. Rather than promoting a complete system overhaul, that could lead to burn out, Wiseman urged delegates to make small changes toward improvements. She told delegates she hoped they would walk away with a number of ways in which they could change their own behaviour to become better leaders, to become "Multipliers".
Participants' feedback called Liz Wiseman a fantastic Keynote Speaker, she received an amazing high score 90% rating her "excellent" or "very good". Delegates also thought they could use Wiseman's tips in their own businesses, as 83% gave "excellent" or "very good" for take-home value.  ALTO members who didn't have the opportunity to attend the seminar can now log in to the ALTO site's members' area and watch the video recording of the whole event, please select Video files- Montreal seminar 2012 under Document Store menu item.  As a taster you can watch the interview with Liz who summarises the Multiplier effect.

And this is what our members thought about the event, please watch the interviews here

"The seminars at ALTO are a completely unique experience... all these years I've been working in the industry there's never been professional development days set aside for our industry to bring agents and schools together."
Gayle Forler, LSC/ EC Canada

"I can see myself right away interacting with our staff maybe in a different way come Monday."
Ilan Cohen, ILAC Canada

"I had a couple of my statf there with me and they all found something in the session that they're going to be able to apply to their daily jobs."
Sharon Curl, Eurocentres Canada

"The seminar gave me some concrete skills that I can take back and use in my company..."
Tamsin Plaxton, Tamwood International Canada

"I found the seminar extremely useful and very pertinent to what I experience on a daily basis for the job I do..."
Mauro Biondi, Emerald Cultural Institute, Ireland