Why change marriot.com if the company is making money and has great brand affinity? The original Mar

At the Web App Master's Tour in Seattle WA, Ken Kellogg discussed the challenges inherent in The Care and Feeding of a Corporate Cash Cow by sharing his experiences managing user research for the redesign of Marriott.com.
You need to negotiate in order to get things done. In order to get executives to align with you, you need to present the information you have and move toward them through collaboration. They won’t move toward you unless you move toward them.
Evangelize what your team is doing and what you have learned. If you learn from mistakes you made, evangelize those as well. The Marriott research team writes white papers, positioning papers, discount airline tickets and goes to talk with other groups about their work.
Multi-variant testing gets you the last 2% of optimization. It does not get you from 0% to 90%. You need fundamental research to cross that gap. Bucket testing discount airline tickets will never supplant usability testing and field reserach.
Marriot’s top redesign challenge: do no harm and don’t hurt the cash cow. Marriot.com was the 7th largest commerce channel on the Web in 2008 and booked 6.5 billion dollars online in 2009. 80,000 transactions per day are booked online. That’s 240 dollars a second. Marriott.com is Marriott’s fastest growing channel and most cost-effective channel.
Why change marriot.com if the company is making money and has great brand affinity? The original Marriott site was not optimized for search engine referrals and only worked well for habituated users -many new users were confused.
The team learned most people don’t like change. Customer service discount airline tickets lines were lit up by their most valuable customers (elite members) protesting the new site changes. Overall satisfaction with Marriott.com dropped upon release.
When you go back to your jobs, find someone you can mentor. Help them become a professional in our field. Help them make all new mistakes. This is not a selfless move. The people you mentor today are the ones that will support you in the future.