I happened upon a discussion on BBC Radio Four last week. The question was ” In the era of the Internet, are guide books still relevent?”.
The pundit that I heard made a very interesting point. Well, I found it interesting because it was a reality that I find myself highlighting all the time. She said that printed guides would always be relevent because they do something that an on-line equivalent could never do. Her point was that a traveller sitting on a train with a Lonely Planet guide (for example) instantly becomes a member of a community of Lonely Planet travellers. The guide itself is a badge of belonging in a way that a computer or even a hand-held device could never be and in an alien environment, however fascinating and enjoyable that might be, the reassurance of belonging is even more attractive.
As someone who has travelled a bit I have first-hand experience of this. Just carrying a guide-book in an exotic place is a license for other travellers to strike up a conversation. Even the different publishers of the guides represent sub-communities – you can find that you become either a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide member according to the guide-book that you carry and I guess there is even a hierarchy.
I’ve recently been involved in a debate over whether being a member of a LinkedIn group is an excuse for other members, whatever their reason for belonging, to send you unsolicited e-mail. This is an off-line equivalent. I even had a friend who, years ago, followed a girl who took his eye into a bookshop on Charing Cross Road (They’d call it stalking these days!). She made for the travel section and after a little browsing bought a guide to Thailand. He did the same and then followed her to the cash desk where he engineered one of those “fancy that” moments. To cut a long story short, they ended up going to Thailand together, although, as many partners who go on holiday together, they came back with a mutual loathing! Personally I have never been put-out by the unsolicited approaches of strange travellers on public transport, although I could imagine, in certain circumstances that I might be, but I am annoyed by e-mail spammers disguised as fellow network members. Now I think about it a woman on the London to Warwick train a few months ago struck up a conversation with me on the basis of a Lee Child book I was reading. She presented herself as a fellow Jack Reacher fan, which seems to have become another brand community in recent years. I suppose there could me a moral there – if you want to date buy a book!
Back to the guide books though, the badge thing definitely doesn’t only work while you are travelling. How often have you turned up at someone’s home and found a bookshelf full of matching guidebooks? OK, so maybe its just the company I keep. We’ve also seen the guide-book brands being leveraged to create TV travel programmes, luggage and travel accessories. Yes, every brand is a community and this guide-book thing has taken my interest. I must add it to my presentations on brand development in the future, as an example of a brand type, alongside religion, football teams and pop groups.
Michael Weaver
August 17, 2010