When people say “Product Marketing”, Apple and Steve Jobs are often the first names that pop up. Apple shaped how modern technology products are marketed and Steve Jobs was the driving force. Their bi-annual Apple events where they announce the soon-to-be-released products and their annual developers conference (WWDC) continue to be the most watched product releases in the world.

It should come as no surprise then that Airbnb started releasing their updates in a similar way after hiring many of Apple’s marketing executives. However, Apple’s influence on Airbnb goes beyond marketing: co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia both came from design backgrounds and have stated the impact that Apple’s philosophy had on their lives.

I often think about Airbnb’s 2021 product launch because it was one of the few launches that actually made me say ‘wow, this is exactly what I wanted’. I was so impressed with how they recognized the needs of their users in this new world, built products for them, and then marketed them in a way that resonated deeply.

Context: COVID and Work From Anywhere

In the US, COVID chatter began quietly in late 2019, turned into skepticism around New Year’s, and by March 2020, Americans across the country were working from home and locking down for an indefinite period of time. What we thought was a short-term lockdown continued to drag on as the virus spread and a couple of things began happening as the pandemic prolonged: 1) we started to get claustrophobic in our own homes and 2) many people realized they could work from anywhere in the world. National Parks started selling out of passes and coworkers began showing up to video conferences from vacation destinations for weeks or months at a time. For these extended stays, hotels were not a great option as they were cramped and missing amenities like kitchens, backyards, and fast wifi. Instead, many people turned to Airbnb to find their WFA paradise.

Airbnb’s 2021 Winter Release

The 2021 Winter release stands out to me as an example of great product marketing and I often think back to it when planning my own campaigns. The biggest takeaways for me are the way they packaged features together for a bigger moment, used insights to build incredibly useful new features, and made the messaging simple and straightforward.

Packaging

Every Product Marketer has probably had this conversation before:

Product team: Hey PMM, we just built this feature that should be really helpful to a lot of our users. Can you help generate a ton of awareness?

PMM: This doesn’t seem like it needs broad awareness, especially compared to the other launches we have in the pipeline. We should just surface this feature when it’s most relevant in the UX.

Product team: Without the marketing, there’s no way we’ll be able to hit our numbers… can we do just a small campaign at least?

One of the constant pushes and pulls of Product Marketing is aligning on how “big” the campaign should be for each launch. For the Product teams, there is often no clear trade-offs between light marketing vs a full campaign — it’s just a bit more copywriting, right? But beyond the marketing team’s resources, a consumer’s attention is a zero-sum game. The more emails and push notifs and in-app messages you send, the less the user will remember about each one. Not to mention the cost of user unsubscribes from your messages altogether. One solution to this problem is bundling your smaller features into a single release. This allows you to grab eyeballs and headlines that the features wouldn’t be able to do separately.

In this release, Airbnb packaged many of these ‘small’ features into one large key message: We’ve dramatically improved our user experience. “50+ upgrades for an even better Airbnb” gives the sense that this is a significant upgrade for the platform without droning on about each new feature. Given the limited attention span of consumers, packaging it all together is a much better strategy than trying to launch each feature separately. Users can read in detail if they want or just walk away knowing that Airbnb has made their experience much better.

Translating Insight into Key Feature

One of the smaller updates that I loved seeing was the Verified Wifi feature. I was really impressed that they took an insight (’Our users need fast wifi in order to work from their Airbnb’) and turned it into a feature (Verified Wifi) that was light on engineering resources (my assumption), relevant for the time, and impactful for guests. Renting an Airbnb that turned out to have slow wifi was one of the biggest pain points of people who tried to work remotely and Airbnb solved it in such a timely manner.

Users can now book with confidence knowing that their potential WFA listing could handle their work needs. Not only that, Airbnb built it in a way that is super easy for Hosts to verify as well. Awesome execution from the product team! If I were on the Product Marketing team, I’d look at the impact of having verified wifi on bookings and encourage more Hosts to verify.

Simplicity in Messaging

At the end of the announcement video, Brian Chesky did his own rendition of the Steve Jobs’ ‘one more thing’ and announced AirCover, an insurance product for Hosts that was included in every booking for free.

If you look at all of AirCover’s features, it’s actually quite a complex product - liability insurance for guest injuries, 3 types of damage protection, income loss protection, and extra benefits for Superhosts. It’s also free for every Host on every booking.

They simplified all of this down to just 11 words:

Top-to-bottom protection. Always included, always free. Only on Airbnb.

‘Top-to-bottom protection’ describes what it is. ‘Always included, always free’ describes when you get it and the cost. ‘Only on Airbnb’ positions the company as the most Host friendly platform to rent out your property. I often think back to this excellent example when trying to keep messaging simple.

Also, props to the PMM for coming up with the name AirCover. It’s very easy to understand and fits nicely within the branding. Naming always seems so easy from the outside but I can only imagine the number of meetings and reviews they had to go through to finalize this.

Conclusion

It’s rare nowadays for marketing to cut through the noise. We all receive so many marketing emails, push notifications, and ads covering every inch of our devices that most of us filter them out immediately. Airbnb’s 2021 Winter Announcement sticks out in my mind as a great example of a company that marketed its new features in a smart, relevant, and — perhaps most importantly for marketing — memorable way.