When we set up Mazzard Farm holiday cottages, almost 4 years ago now, we obviously thought hard about our target audiences. The obvious one was ‘Young Families’, being parents of two young daughters ourselves. And with one half of the Mazzard Farm partnership being Dutch, targeting holiday makers in The Netherlands was an easy decision too. Having invested large sums of money and energy in ensuring our business was a highly sustainable one, we looked into, and spent advertising money accordingly, in the market for people looking for a sustainable holiday, and with Mazzard Farm surrounded by glorious countryside, walkers and cyclists got our attention too.
Four years and 672 bookings later, we have a pretty good overview of who actually comes and stays at Mazzard Farm. That we do indeed get our fair share of young families joining us for their holidays probably doesn’t come as a surprise. We have seen a fair number of walkers, cyclists and runners too, and that the ‘sustainable tourism’ market seems to be a hard one to crack (assuming it actually exists) is something we already elaborated on in an earlier blog.
Yet, we discovered that Mazzard Farm is also very popular with a group we never targeted, a group in fact we never realised was that substantial: families with Twins! It was during last year’s summer, we were preparing for our regular Friday arrival of new guests, when one of our cleaners came to see me and told me we were one cot and a high chair short. Given we already owned 7 of each, and that we only have 6 cottages, I couldn’t quite believe this. “We have two families staying with twins” the cleaner mentioned, "So they take up four cots etc. between them alone." “Two families with twins?” I replied “What a coincidence is that?”
And it was at that stage that it dawned on me that as of late, we seem to have had rather a lot of twins on site. One hour and a bit of analysis of both our database and wikipedia later, and I had the ‘facts’: 7% of previous 12 months' families staying at Mazzard Farm came with twins, whereas in the UK on average, only 1.5% of pregnancies lead to the birth of twins. Knowing a little bit about statistics, I could conclude that this is a significant over-representation!
But why? I hear you ask. Well we asked ourselves that question too, but decided that it was probably best to ask the parents concerned. And their responses were pretty unanimous: they all, so it seemed, had read one or more Mazzard Farm reviews left by parents with twins, and, to quote just one parent we spoke with: “If you think that traveling with one baby is a challenge, just think of what hurdles we face! So if you read that someone in the same position as you has had a great time, then we immediately take notice. The fact that Mazzard Farm provides all the clobber we would otherwise have to bring along – times two! – and for free as well, makes a lot of difference to any parent with young children, and a lot more to those who have two of the same age! That probably explains why you see rather a lot of us, parents with twins.”
So there: for all the targeting and marketing in the world, sometimes you become a firm favourite with a segment of the population you hardly realise existed, and without – seemingly – doing anything different to reach them. Needless to say, we really don’t mind. The more (twins), the merrier! And oh yes, that same day I bought an extra cot and high chair (and a changing mat and a potty, just in case!).
Ruud Jansen Venneboer
Mazzard Farm holiday cottages
Jurassic Coast, East Devon
