DALLAS — For many hotel companies, marketing came to a grinding halt through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and leaders in the field say as it comes back the discipline needs to evolve and innovate.
Speaking during the "View from the Top: Leading Marketing in a Post Pandemic Landscape" session at the 2021 HSMAI Marketing Strategy Conference, Caroline MacDonald, group vice president of sales and marketing for Rosewood Hotel Group, said industry leaders must not shortchange marketing.
"We keep having to explain that marketing isn't an expense; it's an investment. I think that [disconnect] is repeated in every budget," she said, noting that owners often think "you're just driving costs and you're not driving value to the degree we really are."
She said that while technology is important to the field, it should be deployed in a way that is meaningful to guests.
"Personalization kind of comes out of that and how we actually use technology to personalize in different ways," she said.
Dorothy Dowling, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for BWH Hotel Group, said changes in the media environment have given hotel companies "a lot more options to speak with audiences in a much more defined way."
"All of those kinds of things are just giving us a different metric in terms of engagement and touching our customers," she said. "Most of our customers come to us by car, so having all of those kinds of competencies now just gives us different insight into that audience that we're trying to reach."
Lisa Checchio, chief marketing officer for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, said if she could change anything about marketing in the hotel industry it would be to simplify it.
"Marketing has gotten so fragmented over the years," she said. "We're watching different streaming services. We're reading different newspapers. We are using different forms of social media. In the past, it may have been we were all tuning into Thursday night must-see TV, and we knew we could hit a certain demo."
Checchio said reaching specific audiences also calls for a more personalized approach.
"There's no monolith anymore of 'You are a millennial' or 'You like cruises' or 'You only stay in luxury hotels.' Those days are gone," she said. "Getting to the heart of who our customers are and why they need us at the time they need to purchase is really the key."
The way to break through the sea of complexity is to simplify your approach, Checchio said, adding that Wyndham relies on 90% audience-led media built on its own first-party data.
She said letting the audience lead is key especially in a time like the COVID-19 pandemic when consumer travel patterns are changing dramatically.
"By changing our media to be more audience-led, it actually simplified it a lot for us because we knew who we were looking for and we knew who looked like who we were looking for and we knew what our members were looking for," she said.
Dowling said that approach is difficult to pull off without some outside help.
"I fundamentally believe the travel space intermediaries have become far more important in terms of the kind of leadership that they offer to customers," she said. "I also think our agencies are far more important to us today because they really help us in terms of understanding how to connect the dots."
MacDonald said it's increasingly important to study other industries to spark marketing ideas, and for a luxury brand like Rosewood that means paying attention to fashion and e-commerce.
"We're really thinking about how consumers purchase other products and how can we kind of adapt our offerings and where we show up and how we show up and think about that transaction differently," she said.
MacDonald said she stresses to her team that it's fine to try new things and possibly fail en route to finding better solutions, given Rosewood is a small, single-brand company without outside stakeholders.
That challenge is more significant for larger branding companies with members and franchisees, such as Best Western and Wyndham respectively.
Checchio said when selling the benefits of marketing initiatives at her company, it's important to lean in to the fact that franchisees are largely small business owners, with adventurous spirits.
"They're all small business owners, and that entrepreneurial spirit that they all embody, it fuels us all at a brand level to want to give them anything that we can," she said.