Does travel ‘consumption’ follow brand laws?

Pew Research Center asked 10,000 Americans about their travel history.

27% of Americans have never left the country. (Tho to be fair, New York to Los Angeles is 300 miles farther than Lisbon to Latvia. To paraphrase Michelle Shocked, you can travel for days and never leave the USA.)

19% visited 1 country. 12% visited 2. And it went down from there. (The chart is stair-stepped because their questions were binned above that: 3-4 countries, 5-9, then 10+.)

This is the familiar banana curve. Most ‘buyers’ of international travel are light buyers. Few are heavy. And the shape of the curve is a banana. (Thanks Wiemer Snijders for the lovely nickname.)

Unless you have one client and it’s the Dept of Defense, you probably have a banana curve of buyers. It might be when measured over years for B2B accounts, or for weeks for coffee shops. But it’s quite the universal pattern.

Three reasons why this matters:

1. It flies in the face of the fairy tale about having "just 1,000 true fans" or "just 6 big healthy clients and not a bunch of little annoying ones."

2. It gives you a norm to measure your ‘wiggle’ against.

3. Once you embrace this truth, you stop spending money fighting the laws of nature.