Mapping the perception of the HomeAway brand versus Airbnb & Booking.com

Establishing archetypes, or persona for customers is an important part of consumer services brands. Our client, HomeAway – the original AirBnB that have been renting out owner’s homes since the 1990’s – had some existing typologies developed, and we worked together to add another dimension to this knowledge.

We compared HomeAway and it’s local market brand names against competitors Airbnb & Booking.com, in the US, UK, France, and Germany.

Our bespoke brand personality implicit test was developed just for this purpose.

It is true that the Big Five Personality Traits are stable across humans. They also map to brands – brands themselves can have a definable personality. The word-pairs we use are drawn from studies tested on 12,789 respondents, in nine countries, on 193 brands, and are stable within and between brands.

We used the implicit variation, which is our quick-response online word-matching task (10 mins) satisfied by pressing either the ‘E’ or ‘I’ key to associate a displayed brand logo with one of the displayed word-pairs.

We took 1,142 homeowners who rent out their property in the US, UK, France, and Germany and ran them through our test.

For HomeAway we were able to generate unique data that made the link between:

1. The data warehouse groups (how they behave)
2. Demographic information (who they are – demographic questions)

How they feel towards the brand and competitor (how they feel)

We saw the true relationship between HomeAway and the competitors – where there are comparative weaknesses and strengths – you can see some of the words on the image. We have edited our bespoke tool.

We use this information to make guidance on language, imagery, and interaction to counter the weaknesses (relative to the competition) using outputs.