Ana Brant is Global Director of Guest Research and Experience Design for Dorchester Collection’s group of luxury hotels, and serves on the advisory board of British fashion brand Turnbull & Asser. Earlier in her career, she held positions at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Walt Disney World. Ms. Brant is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she received a Master’s degree in Service Leadership and a Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality Management. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Business Administration at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, where her research is grounded in consumer culture theories and resource-based organizational strategies. Ms. Brant’s views and opinions are featured regularly in the Harvard Business Review and Forbes magazine, as well as at speaking engagements for institutions such as Cornell University, Harvard University, Wharton School of Business, SciencesPo, École Hôtelière de Lausanne, and The Malcolm Baldrige Awards.
Social Listening
Event Overview
Your customers are talking on social media, so you need to be listening.
This is especially true for hospitality and service brands, for which customer experience is king. We know personalized, responsive experiences engender brand loyalty and trust. Some customers appreciate a small gesture of kindness like a welcome gift in their room or complimentary dessert in a restaurant. But for many of today’s customers, it’s a special and powerful moment when a brand they love recognizes them on social media in front of their followers.
Creating this kind of customer interaction and recognition on social media doesn’t happen overnight. Social listening requires looking beyond customer transactions to the bigger picture of their life circumstances and what they value most. Few businesses have shifted from using social media for brand communications toward experience management. Even fewer have found ways to recognize, surprise, and keep in touch with customers throughout their entire life cycle.
In this session, our panel of faculty experts and service industry entrepreneurs will explore how to adopt a customer-centric business model to ensure that delight happens in all the right places. You’ll discover key considerations for using social listening to create powerful, personalized customer experiences across all of your customer touch points.
What You'll Learn
- How to define, create, and store customer knowledge
- Tips for practicing customer-centricity
- Which types of organizations and experiences can benefit from social listening
- Ways to create personalized experiences while protecting customer privacy
- How to make experience design decisions and put personalization into use
- Strategies for blending physical and digital experiences
Speakers
Ian-Michael Farkas is a proven go-to-market executive with over 15 years of experience supporting complex customer opportunities through sales, strategy, business development, digital, and marketing roles within the public and private sector. He has also founded two startups. Mr. Farkas is currently focused on strategy and commercial growth in the Americas for Local Measure, a high-growth tech company headquartered in Australia. He specializes in building and working closely with demand generation, CS, product, and marketing teams as well as successfully closing strategic deals and MSAs with global enterprises including Hilton, Virgin, Univision, and OrangeTheory. Mr. Farkas spends a lot of time with established/emerging technology senior leaders and senior execs, including within Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, and Salesforce. He currently serves as an Advisory Board Member at Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research and mentors students at the Lamba School of Coding.
Kathy LaTour is the Banfi Vintners Professor of Wine Education and Management and an Associate Professor of Services Marketing at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. She is an expert in the area of marketing hedonic experiences, with a particular focus on wine and gambling. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1997. From 1997 to 2001, Dr. LaTour served as a visiting scholar in the Mind of the Market Lab at the Harvard Business School, where she worked with Gerald Zaltman and Stephen Kosslyn on applications of cognitive neuroscience to marketing. From 2004 to 2011, she was on the faculty of the UNLV Hotel School, where she taught marketing, marketing research, and a strategic-focused consumer behavior class to undergraduate and graduate hospitality students.
Dr. LaTour’s research takes a consumer psychology perspective toward how marketers should approach branding, experience design, communications, and loyalty programs. She uses both experimental designs and in-depth interview techniques to better understand consumer behavior, fusing macro cultural and micro psychological dimensions to her research. Dr. LaTour’s major research focus has been on the complexity of human memory. Her research on memory reconstruction was first published in the top consumer psychology journal, Journal of Consumer Research, and won both Best Paper for Research Based on a Dissertation, as well as Best Article published in that year (1999) — a major accomplishment in the discipline. Dr. LaTour has published both wine and gambling research in that journal, and her academic research has also appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Travel Research, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and Annals of Tourism Research. Her work has also appeared in the general news media, such as the New York Times, USA Today, United In-flight magazine, Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas Sun, and Portland Oregonian.
Dr. LaTour’s current research focus is on the development of knowledge with the highly ambiguous perceptual experienced product of wine, how cross-sensory learning methods can be employed to enhance consumer learning, sensory aspects of branding and brand knowledge representation, and what strategies or knowledge experts (i.e., masters) use to assess their own tasting experiences. As a means to better understand the nature of expertise, Dr. LaTour began her own wine learning journey. In 2011, she received her certified sommelier diploma from the International Sommelier Guild, her sommelier certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers, and Certified Wine Specialist recognition from the Society of Wine Educators. Dr. LaTour is currently a student in the Master of Wine program offered through the Institute of Masters of Wine and is studying for her MW, considered to be the highest level of business and wine knowledge in the industry. She has been developing a case-based wine marketing class and is working on several cases and research articles in this area. Dr. LaTour has also worked with a number of consulting companies, such as Experience Engineering and Olson Zaltman Associates, with clients that include Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney, World Bank, Las Vegas Sands, and Yum! Foods. She firmly believes that academic research can inform practice, and practice can inform academe.
Liam Fayed is a serial entrepreneur, creative executive, and consumer venture investor. He is co-founder and Chief Brand Officer of Surf Air Mobility, where he has reshaped the growth, product, sales, and member experience departments, helping to reinvent the modern flying experience and create a new category of air travel built on aircraft electrification. Previously, Mr. Fayed was founder, creative director, and CEO of menswear label BESPOKEN New York. He also serves on the advisory board of British fashion brand Turnbull & Asser and is a graduate of Syracuse University, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Business.
Ana Brant is Global Director of Guest Research and Experience Design for Dorchester Collection’s group of luxury hotels, and serves on the advisory board of British fashion brand Turnbull & Asser. Earlier in her career, she held positions at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Walt Disney World. Ms. Brant is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she received a Master’s degree in Service Leadership and a Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality Management. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Business Administration at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, where her research is grounded in consumer culture theories and resource-based organizational strategies. Ms. Brant’s views and opinions are featured regularly in the Harvard Business Review and Forbes magazine, as well as at speaking engagements for institutions such as Cornell University, Harvard University, Wharton School of Business, SciencesPo, École Hôtelière de Lausanne, and The Malcolm Baldrige Awards.
Ian-Michael Farkas is a proven go-to-market executive with over 15 years of experience supporting complex customer opportunities through sales, strategy, business development, digital, and marketing roles within the public and private sector. He has also founded two startups. Mr. Farkas is currently focused on strategy and commercial growth in the Americas for Local Measure, a high-growth tech company headquartered in Australia. He specializes in building and working closely with demand generation, CS, product, and marketing teams as well as successfully closing strategic deals and MSAs with global enterprises including Hilton, Virgin, Univision, and OrangeTheory. Mr. Farkas spends a lot of time with established/emerging technology senior leaders and senior execs, including within Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, and Salesforce. He currently serves as an Advisory Board Member at Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research and mentors students at the Lamba School of Coding.
Kathy LaTour is the Banfi Vintners Professor of Wine Education and Management and an Associate Professor of Services Marketing at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. She is an expert in the area of marketing hedonic experiences, with a particular focus on wine and gambling. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1997. From 1997 to 2001, Dr. LaTour served as a visiting scholar in the Mind of the Market Lab at the Harvard Business School, where she worked with Gerald Zaltman and Stephen Kosslyn on applications of cognitive neuroscience to marketing. From 2004 to 2011, she was on the faculty of the UNLV Hotel School, where she taught marketing, marketing research, and a strategic-focused consumer behavior class to undergraduate and graduate hospitality students.
Dr. LaTour’s research takes a consumer psychology perspective toward how marketers should approach branding, experience design, communications, and loyalty programs. She uses both experimental designs and in-depth interview techniques to better understand consumer behavior, fusing macro cultural and micro psychological dimensions to her research. Dr. LaTour’s major research focus has been on the complexity of human memory. Her research on memory reconstruction was first published in the top consumer psychology journal, Journal of Consumer Research, and won both Best Paper for Research Based on a Dissertation, as well as Best Article published in that year (1999) — a major accomplishment in the discipline. Dr. LaTour has published both wine and gambling research in that journal, and her academic research has also appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Travel Research, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and Annals of Tourism Research. Her work has also appeared in the general news media, such as the New York Times, USA Today, United In-flight magazine, Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas Sun, and Portland Oregonian.
Dr. LaTour’s current research focus is on the development of knowledge with the highly ambiguous perceptual experienced product of wine, how cross-sensory learning methods can be employed to enhance consumer learning, sensory aspects of branding and brand knowledge representation, and what strategies or knowledge experts (i.e., masters) use to assess their own tasting experiences. As a means to better understand the nature of expertise, Dr. LaTour began her own wine learning journey. In 2011, she received her certified sommelier diploma from the International Sommelier Guild, her sommelier certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers, and Certified Wine Specialist recognition from the Society of Wine Educators. Dr. LaTour is currently a student in the Master of Wine program offered through the Institute of Masters of Wine and is studying for her MW, considered to be the highest level of business and wine knowledge in the industry. She has been developing a case-based wine marketing class and is working on several cases and research articles in this area. Dr. LaTour has also worked with a number of consulting companies, such as Experience Engineering and Olson Zaltman Associates, with clients that include Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney, World Bank, Las Vegas Sands, and Yum! Foods. She firmly believes that academic research can inform practice, and practice can inform academe.
Liam Fayed is a serial entrepreneur, creative executive, and consumer venture investor. He is co-founder and Chief Brand Officer of Surf Air Mobility, where he has reshaped the growth, product, sales, and member experience departments, helping to reinvent the modern flying experience and create a new category of air travel built on aircraft electrification. Previously, Mr. Fayed was founder, creative director, and CEO of menswear label BESPOKEN New York. He also serves on the advisory board of British fashion brand Turnbull & Asser and is a graduate of Syracuse University, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Business.
- View slide #1
- View slide #2
- View slide #3
- View slide #4
View Keynote by completing the form below.
You're Registered!