San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants
is the first and leading collection of boutique Hotels throughout the United
States and Canada. Kimpton Hotels offers services and design elements focused
on care, comfort, style, flavor and fun. Every Kimpton hotel reflects the energy,
personality and pulse of its location, history and architectural style. With
presence in several big cities across the United States, Kimpton fuses art,
social responsibility and fine cuisine into its hotels and restaurants such
that each hotel is uniquely branded to reflect the characteristics of the
cities where the hotel is located. Kimpton uses this strategy to target
specific market segments in these key cities. In doing so however, a
significant challenge that they faced, was a lack of overall recognition for
the Kimpton brand. This originated from the fact that travelers usually
remembered each individual hotel that they visited in a respective city, but
failed to recognize that particular hotel was a part of the Kimpton chain.
This was because Kimpton’s efforts to give each hotel its own unique theme
culminated in the individual hotels’ brands becoming more famous, prominent and
identifiable than the parent brand itself. Moreover, bookings done via online
mediums such as Priceline failed to identify a certain hotel as a part of the
Kimpton group. Another problem Kimpton faced with these websites was that of
inability to allocate points for their “In-Touch” loyalty program. Also,
efforts to communicate information about this program were undertaken by local
properties and failed to target the specific customer groups identified by
Kimpton. Based on online research, Kimpton Group identified the likes of The
Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and Peninsula Hotels to be their specific prime
competitors. From a broader perspective, it is reasonable to infer that
competing hotel chains offering similar services and within the same price
bracket, but with superior parent brand awareness may also pose a significant
threat to Kimpton.
Of the
identified target audiences, if Kimpton were to focus on Pet lovers and Eco-conscious travelers, they can tailor their “In
Touch” campaign in the following ways. Redesigning all the forms of
communication such as e-mails, posts. Etc. to reflect an environment and animal
friendly theme, preferably with the use of earthly colors like blue and green.
They should also highlight these aspects of the hotels’ overall theme and any
environmental or animal rights programs that they may be a part of. A few minor
adjustments to the hotels decor could go a long way in procuring the interest
of these target groups. This could include the introduction of creative
customer centric methods of beautification such as the use of self-sufficient
fish tanks and small botanical gardens, which could make for a picturesque
ambience as well as be used to leverage the appeal of these audiences. Some
kind of association with environmental protection groups and animal right’s
activists such as PETA is another way to attract desired attention to the
program. The use of social media to propagate these messages, ideas and
initiatives whilst subtly advertising the “In touch” campaign could prove
equally effective. Alternatively, the “In Touch” program can be integrated into
their communications mix with the use of PR. The best way to communicate
various aspects of this program to the masses effectively is directly and so it
would be useful to host invitation based complementary events for the Kimpton
faithful at select locations for the sole purpose of spreading awareness about
the “In-Touch” program as well as the association of the parent brand. If these
events can include a presentation by the group’s management or PR division
promoting a catchy campaign tagline such as ‘Live and Let live’ (Live being a
Pun for living at the hotel as well as supporting harmonious and holistic
living with the environment and all life forms by and large), it could prove
paramount to achieving the established goals.
The
utilization of client centric and customer specific media vehicles such as the
Internet advertising, forms of new media like SMS and e-mail, localized print ads
and targeted narrowcasting should suffice for introduction of this campaign.
This is primarily because it is easier to assess effectiveness with a
concentrated low budget media campaign rather than the highly risky, expensive
and unnecessary use of larger media vehicles such as Broadcasting. With the
exception of narrowcasting efforts such as radio commercials, the performance
of social media campaigns can be easily and cost-effectively measured using
tools such as Facebook analytics. Similar tools are available to numerically
quantify the response rates of SMS and e-mail communications.
An
efficient method for Kimpton hotels to communicate their philosophy throughout
the internal organization and their community would be by first considering the
analogy of the service triangle. They can convey their messages and ‘set the
promise’ to their faithful customers through an adoption of the external
marketing methodologies discussed above. In order to internally market
themselves to their employees, they can arrange seminars and training programs
to explain the characteristics of their brand thoroughly. This will be critical
because in the service sector, there is a high level of contact between the
front line staff and the customers and it is up to an organizations employees
to deliver the promises established by the company through interactive
marketing. For this, it is important that they themselves understand the
mission, values and everything that Kimpton stands for in order to properly enable
these promises. A significant challenge that Kimpton may face in doing is that
of miscommunicating or not clearly these messages to the customers or even
their employees for that matter. This could potentially amount to a breakdown
of the entire system and consequently the market themselves in the manner that
they so please.
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