Three Things I Learned About Marketing on My Trip to Spain

I'll tell anyone who will listen: I just came back from a two-week vacation from Spain.

"Oh Liz, did you have a good trip?" (this is the part I love) "No, it sucked." Between getting sick, weather, and our excursions getting cancelled for apparently no reason, this trip ranked second-to-last on all the vacations I've taken, just above my first trip to India when our plane engine died over the Atlantic and we got rerouted to Iceland.

But that's not what this article is about. This article is about the marketing I noticed in Spain.

Marketing is everywhere, as we all know. And I'm sure there's more than three things I could have learned about Spanish (or European) marketing. But I was on vacation, and three days of that vacation I was stuck in a hotel room while my friend and husband enjoyed themselves free of fever, so here's what I've got:

There is no brand pushing.

In the US, we see brands on every corner. You can't walk twelve paces down a city street without seeing a Starbucks, McDonalds, or Famous Footwear (although, Burger King is the most frequent 'Fast Food' brand we saw in Spain, and even that was few and far between). It may be because of the parts of the cities we stayed in, but for the most part, it was all boutiques and independently owned restaurants.

There's an exclusivity to this type of an approach, to be sure. For example, if you're shopping boutique, it's highly unlikely you're going to run into someone else wearing the same shirt as you later on. From a marketing perspective, the lack of availability of said brands leads more for want: going to the Pret a Manger is now an event, rather than a quick croissant.

"You have it, and I want it" has always been a great way to market - especially luxury goods. General availability is what takes us to the local Aldi to get the peanut butter, not to buy a Rolex.

The lesson learned from easing the brakes off of brand pushing is that once everyone has one, no one wants one (except you, Diet Coke. I'll always want you). Peloton has recently learned this lesson, since they've tapped out their available market with their high-priced exercise bikes and are now turning towards increasing prices and laying off employees to earn money while they try to come up with the next big idea (shame on you, Peloton). As marketers, if we focus too much on brand, we may force our way into brand fatigue - which causes greater corporate stress than not making the goals to begin with.

Consistency is King.

This next lesson is a bit controversial to what I just said, but there's a twist, I swear.

Ask me what "Rings of Power" is translated into Spanish, and I can recite it as fast as "the Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." (The answer is Los Anillos del Poder.)

Season 2 of Amazon's Lord of the Rings spin-off, The Rings of Power, was just released, and billboards announcing the release were everywhere.

Yes, this absolutely a form of brand-pushing. But it was long-awaited, and it's only a short period of time.

Every - and I mean EVERY - digital kiosk we passed had an advertisement for the show on it. Amazon clearly spent a lot of money on these digital placements, but probably it's probably pennies in comparison to what they earned from Prime membership renewal sales (they just earned $14.99 from me so I could renew, binge, and unsubscribe) and from third-party advertising.

The lesson here is make the marketing consistent (Los Anillos del Poder), and if you want a successful marketing campaign, actually invest in the campaign. Throwing $5 towards a campaign and hoping for a sticky miracle is not going to work - you need consistent messaging across a large audience in order to get your ROI, and it'll be worth it.

If you can't remarket, charge them.

We're all familiar with the pop-up you receive when you enter into a new site: Would you like to 'accept all cookies,' or 'reject?' 90% of the time, I click 'accept,' mainly because I'm not paying attention.

In Spain, these ads came up with every search - and it wasn't a tiny pop-up that you could ignore, it was an entire blog-post-lengthed book that you had to scroll through in order to accept or reject. And if you chose to reject? Most of the websites then forced you to pay to see the content.

In a way, this was brilliant (don't get me wrong, I hated giving up my ability to keep my cookies private. But the strategy was bold). If the brand wasn't making money by retargeting you or selling your cookies third-party, then they were going to make money off of you just to allow you to access the content. Or, you could keep your money and your privacy, and go somewhere else. It's bold, it's ridiculous, and it worked: I allowed them my cookies and continued to get retargeted while I was in the country.

Do I think more brands in the US should adopt this strategy? Absolutely not. I think information should be free, and quite frankly, I don't even remember the brands anymore to tell you who was using this strategy (although the most notable one was a news journal, which feels illegal to me to withhold information). However, I do think this strategy was creative, and we could use this type of out-of-the-box thinking to generate revenue for our own brands.

The things I learned in Spain weren't life-altering, but they were good reminders on the ABC's of marketing, and it was nice to get a fresh perspective. And for those of you wondering, no . . . I probably won't be going back anytime soon.