Agent Tip

Read What Your Clients Read.

By: Richard Earls "TravelReacearch On Line"

Subscribing to different consumer magazines that you wouldn’t normally read (not into white-water rafting? Subscribe to National Geographic Adventure; if you are female – subscribe to Men’s Journal) is a great way to stimulate the creative "right side" of your brain to help develop new marketing ideas.

Magazines often represent the work product of some of the best and brightest minds in marketing and advertising. The millions of dollars that companies spend in advertising creative can give you some ideas of your own.

These are the same periodicals your clients are reading. It helps to occassionally put yourself in your client’s shoes and flip through a new magazine to see what’s influencing and inspiring them.

For example, O, the Oprah magazine, has a monthly printed feature called “Breathing Space” that captures a unique and amazing setting, somewhere around the world. Readers are invited to stare at the image and absorb its beauty.

As a travel agent, you have the opportunity to take it one step further and suggest a visit in person. Take a hint from cosmetics counters nationwide, and remove these pages from a magazine and place them on a visible desk in your office, or in a portfolio.

Magazines of this quality offer additional credibility and suggestibility when you present them along with your own proposals. Even a weekly celebrity magazine will tell you who is honeymooning where and keep you up to date on the hottest spas and restaurants. It’s not a bad way to spend a few minutes a week, and it lets you take the right-side of your brain for a bit of exercise!

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