Inside Story of How Trivago Built a Brand One Country at a Time

Now that Trivago's co-founders and CFO are heading out on their IPO roadshow to sell the company's merits to investors, they are spilling secrets on how and why they built the brand the way they did. It's an interesting tale from the Dusseldorf, Germany-headquartered hotel metasearch site when you compare it to the construction of fellow European rival and partner Booking.com, especially as Trivago CEO Rolf Schrömgens said, "We don't see a limitation right now" in the company's potential growth and that Trivago aspires to be "the player" in hotel search. Trying to Cut Out Google Founded in 2005 and having only taken about $1.2 million in external funding in its history [Expedia bought out pre-existing investors when it took a 63.5 percent stake in the company four years ago], Trivago decided in 2008 that it would try TV advertising to build its brand because relying on Google and other search engines to deliver traffic would be too risky. "We soon realized we need to be the first contact to the customer," Alex Hefer, Trivago's CFO, said in a video posted with the company's roadshow materials. "... The only way to do that was developing a brand." Unlike its neighbor in Amsterdam, Booking.com, which sold 432 million room nights last year by going heavy in digital marketing with some TV thrown in, Trivago relies much more heavily on television advertising. There weren't a lot of travel companies doing brand marketing in the 2008-2009 period [unlike the crowded and very competitive TV advertising market today] when Trivago developed its first TV campaign, CEO Schrömgens said. Although TV isn't considered "performance marketing" that can be measured relatively easily, Trivago's strategy was not bereft of testing or analytics. “We looked at what spot was aired and what was the reaction on our site," Schrömgens said. "We kept on doing what worked and just stopped doing what didn’t