A brand new point of focus
The new order has taken hold in hotel marketing, reports Stuart Harrison.
The new order in the way hotel companies are being structured was never more evident than in the shift of emphasis outlined by speaker after speaker at the recent International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin.
This new order places a greater importance on marketing, moving to centre stage the delivery of the business within a brand's marketing mix.
Of course, the nurturing of the brand as an asset, through giving more ownership to marketing, has always been within the culture of more enlightened industries. Indeed, the hallmark of whether a company or industry truly understands the value of its brands is whether it sees the role of marketing at the highest level or as subservient to operations and finance.
Our industry leaders are now more interested in the delivery of the business because the fundamentals of company structures are changing. They want to buy businesses with an operational upside, separating ownership of the asset from operational cashflow. With the property asset someone else's concern, our leaders can direct their energies into revenue streams.
Listening to the debates at the Berlin forum, you could have been forgiven for believing you had been dropped into a convention on brands and marketing. With the hotel property assets sitting somewhere else - possibly in your pension fund portfolio - everyone proffered a view on product, positioning and future trends of hotel brands.
There were some canny comments and some quite stupid ones. The following thought-provoking observation from Guy Hands, chief executive of Terra Firma Capital Partners, only serves to point out why he has become such a driver in our industry. "Boutique hotels," he observed "are becoming chains, and chains are becoming boutique. Bespoke are becoming global, and global are becoming bespoke."
Even merchant bankers, under the title "Dealing with the dealmakers", were quick to throw in their pennyworth. In answer to one question, they even suggested that airlines could develop hotel brands as part of vertical integration. Perhaps they had never heard of Pan Am and Inter-Continental, or United Airlines and Hilton.
All this realignment of focus is good news for hotel industry marketers, who should become more assertive in shaping the future of their companies. If they don't, then the world, its wife and the merchant bankers will steal their clothes.
- Stuart Harrison will be speaking at Extend The Spend, a one-day seminar on how to get more from your customers, on 17 June in Caterer‘s offices in Sutton, Surrey. Cost will be £65 plus VAT.
Stuart Harrison runs the Profitable Hotel company and is a visiting fellow of Oxford Brookes University
