Smart Hospitality Marketing Works, SHA Professor Writes in New Book

Smart Hospitality Marketing Works, SHA Professor Writes in New Book

Hospitality is business-with a heart, says Leora Lanz.

"People in hospitality are special people because they serve others, they put other people first," she says. "We're about business, but we are also a philosophy."

Lanz (COM'87) is the director of online programs at Boston University's School of Hospitality Administration and an associate professor of the practice of marketing. She gained this perspective during two decades as a hospitality marketing consultant, specializing in hotels, but working with all sectors of the industry. And now she's put the foundational philosophy of her lessons into a debut publication, Developing Your Marketing Mindset: Real-World Lessons from Hospitality (Hospitality Strategies Press, 2025). It quickly reached No. 1 in Amazon's Hospitality, Travel & Tourism, Customer Relations, and Marketing & Consumer Behavior categories.

"If hospitality is about making connections to make people feel good, valued, and heard, then we have an obligation in hospitality to do right by people," she says.

BU Today spoke with Lanz about how her students influenced her and the skills that marketers can learn from the hospitality industry.

BU Today: Tell us about the drafting process. What inspired you to add "published author" to your CV?

Lanz: I've journaled since I was 13 years old, and I started this book as a way to [chronicle] what I learned in teaching and to document the fun I've had over 10 years of teaching. I started to reach out to over 100 of my former students, whom I still have great relationships with. I was asking: Do you remember any of the mantras that I shared in class, and do you apply them today? Does anything stick? And everybody came back with stories about how they apply these lessons in their work today. When I started to shape the book and put together chapters, I was following the methodology of what I teach in class for marketing. As I started to receive input from former students, I literally put the puzzle pieces together to see where it fit into the table of contents I was designing. So now something was taking shape.

BU Today: In addition to reaching out to former students, you've also included a number of marketing scenarios pulled straight from the classroom. What inspired you?

Lanz: Most of the book's examples come from my experiential marketing course, where we work with real businesses in real time, and a few examples from my digital marketing strategies course. I'll usually hear from members of the industry reaching out and asking if they can be part of our classes, and I really feel in my soul that we've been blessed with the projects that come to us. These businesses are comfortable enough to come into a classroom and share a challenge where they sometimes can't see the forest for the trees-but our students can. I'll tell these companies that they're going to hear some messaging that you may not expect, and sometimes you just need fresh outside thinking from the mouths and minds of young people. As I put the book together, I found that it became a love letter to the students of this program.

BU Today: Can you share an example?

Lanz: I'll give an example that's actually not in the book, but it's fresh in my mind: In our experiential marketing class, we recently worked with a branded hotel in Boston that renovated their gym, and they wondered why the guest satisfaction scores for the gym weren't going up… Students conducted primary and secondary research, and discovered that the average length of stay for a business traveler in Boston is two nights. This is a walkable city and people aren't necessarily going to stay in the hotel to use the gym-they're going for a walk. So they suggested creating a Boston walking map that starts at the gym, where you can fill up a branded water bottle with electrolyte water, and brings you back to the gym to refill your bottle at the end of the day. Now we're thinking like marketers, because we're actually showing you that we give a darn about your health and wellness. We're not just saying, "Use our gym," we're saying, "We care about your wellness." This is an example of how to market with meaning.

BU Today: Why not just get in, sell the product, and get out? Why go deeper?

Listen, everybody's in business to make a buck, otherwise it wouldn't be business. But why are we selling this commodity, this product, this service? If we put ourselves in the perspective of the other person receiving [the message]-which is what we should do as marketers-how does it benefit them? I don't want us selling benefits or features, I want us connecting and informing how this is going to make that person better, how it's going to be good for them. I'm pushing it toward my three pillars: wellness, sustainability, and community, which envelops both. If you educate me as to why something you sell or market is going to benefit me, health-wise, or my community, environmentally, that's more meaningful and I'll be willing to spend more with you. I feel confident enough, and the data is there to back me up, that people are willing to pay for it, and that it is good for business.

BU Today: Can you talk about the data in the book?

My bonus chapter is the data from McKinsey, BCG, and Mindclick that says people want to be informed about what you're doing to support wellness and sustainability. If you consider marketing to be informing and educating, as opposed to selling, then people will want to know what you're doing authentically-no wellness washing, no greenwashing. It's marketing's responsibility that if we could do more, even just a step more, we need to share that. The data in that chapter says that people are not only going to become more brand loyal to you if you inform them about what you're doing to help their wellness and sustainability, they'll spend more with you too. So, doing good is good for business.

BU Today: Sounds like there's a wealth of information to draw from, and yet the book doesn't feel stuffy or textbook-y at all.

As I was reaching out to various publishers at the start of this process, one very smart publisher said, "Your book is turning into something lengthy; you've got these narrative chapters and you've got more technical meat in there. You need to split it into two." So the second book, Marketing Mindset in Motion, comes out February 2, and focuses more on the [technical] approaches you can take to communicate and market effectively now that you have this mindset in place. But the great part is both books can stand on their own. This is about marketing being more than selling, [and more about] connecting and building relationships. I think a lot of businesses forget that, and hopefully this is a good reminder.

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