The Big Marketing Idea for the Hospitality Industry
In an article that we published earlier this year we suggested that marketers could learn from how luxury hotels share information and data internally, to improve their own marketing integration and effectiveness.
Let us take a look back into the hospitality sector, but this time to analyse some of the Big Ideas that hotel brands are using to successfully advertise or reposition themselves.
Hotel brands are generally known for focusing their advertising on price, offers, location, etc. There is rarely a Big Idea behind some of the uninspired campaigns. No, half price on weekends is not a Big Idea.
Following this WARC article, traditional advertising still seems to be the preferred method for most hotel brands. However one hotel brand, Outrigger Hotels and Resorts leisure group, has chosen to eliminate traditional advertising all together, to the benefit of integrating digital marketing with customer service. They say that creativity in products and their service delivery is more important than in advertising.
The group concentrates on helping customers find out about events, things to do and see in the local area, through blogs and daily updates, once they are on the group’s properties. The Big Idea is to improve customers experience once on site and get the customers to talk about it. Helped by hotel reputation management platform Revinate, the hotel group collects customer satisfaction and feedback in real time allowing them to be incredibly agile when it comes to improving or correcting their services.
Hotel brands like Sofitel, Marriot and Ibis are repositioning them selves using innovative ideas and their unique personality traits, as Big Ideas to differentiate from their competitors.
In an insightful article by Ebiquity (full article here) we see the example of Marriott’s integrated campaign “Travel Brilliantly”, which amplifies the brand’s dedication to shape the future of travel. The integrated campaign rolled out on TV and all digital channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, invites visitors to submit their ideas to improve the modern travel experience across four themes – design, culinary, wellness and technology. Upon submission into a co-creation contest, the person with the best ideas will be chosen and given the opportunity to design future innovations with a team of Marriott experts, in a bid to enhance travel for the next generation. Essentially, the brand is crowdsourcing ideas from well-travelled individuals to co-create the future of travel, thus expressing its bold and innovative personality.
As Outrigger Hotels, Marriott is using customer interactions to improve its offering:
At Flock we believe that the Big Idea is the key for campaigns to be successful, truly integrated across all media, interactive, shareable, viral… The bigger the Idea, the better the ROMI.
Flock brings everyone together to deliver breakthrough integrated marketing ideas by bringing planners together to create integrated idea briefs, creatives together to create big integrated ideas and helps manage the idea through to production across all media.
Flock does not create the ideas but instead it facilitates the creative process, using techniques from theatre, improvised comedy, sports and even military to help inspire creativity. These ideas then have all media “baked in” to work better and are easier to integrate than ideas that originate from a TV script
The benefits of Flock’s big idea co-creation service (see here for full information) include creative neutrality, speed and efficiency and effective integrated creative ideas.
If you are thinking of your brand’s Big Idea, and believe you need more than a weekend offer to do so, Flock can help you co-create the Big Idea and make sure your campaign is fully integrated. Contact us here to discuss.
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