Brand Business - Steven Taylor of Accor Hotels

Steven Taylor, chief marketing officer

Accor's chief marketing officer has worked in hospitality since 2003. Prior to his current position, Taylor held positions at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts and Le Meridien.

 

Steven Taylor was speaking to us at PhocusWire for part of our Marketing Masters theme month.

PhocusWire's theme month in November is Marketing Masters.

This series of articles looks at a role in a travel business that has evolved massively over the years: the chief marketing officer.

In fact, some brands have given this position an entirely different title - perhaps reflecting how many other disciplines and strategies, especially in the digital realm, have come together.

In this interview we speak to Steven Taylor, chief marketing officer at Accor Hotels.

What industries do you believe travel can learn from when it comes to marketing?

Rather than looking at one industry, generally I take inspiration from a range of brands across industries around specific themes:

• Purpose & value ‐ I’m always inspired by brands that have strong values and purpose and connect with consumers to forge deeper relationships and relevance. Nike is a great example through campaigns such as ‘Dream Crazier’, and their recent support of Colin Kaepernick. This approach inspired our recent repositioning of Ibis with our ‘we are open’ campaign. Our goal was to showcase the vibrant, social and open environment of Ibis to its local communities, while giving us a platform to talk about our brand values and passion to support an open, tolerant and inclusive society.
• Customer experience & utility – Brands that deliver outstanding value by developing a seamless and integrated customer experience accessible wherever and whenever customers want, will always earn my respect. I am impressed by the way Uber, Deliveroo, Tencent and Alibaba all innovate around the customer journey, leveraging technology to build a walled garden of value around their customers. This creates brand loyalty, which is far deeper than what communications or advertising alone can do. We are employing this type of strategy with the launch of our new lifestyle loyalty program, ALL, which offers a platform to engage our members beyond the traditional travel cycle and to also add value in our guests’ everyday lives, whether at home or on the road.
• Personalization ‐ What is also a real inspiration are the way brand’s like Netflix and Amazon are able to personalize content and communication – the sophisticated algorithm which Netflix uses to provide personalized recommendations and content should be an inspiration to all brands across travel and beyond. At the heights of luxury hospitality, recognizing guests’ particular needs and desires is not new – for more than 130 years at Raffles travelers are said to arrive as guests, leave as friends and return as family. Yet our opportunity is to bring ever more individualized experiences to guests of our mid‐scale and economy hotels, and we’re continuously investing in the technology and customer interface that allows us to do so.

Describe a campaign that sticks in your mind from any industry and why is it memorable?

The Dove Real Beauty sketches was one of the most iconic campaigns of the last 15 years, setting a new bar for advertising and reinforcing that brands can and should extend beyond product advertising and be a genuine force for good.

This campaign helped to drive a conversation around the importance of self‐confidence, contributed to the empowerment of women and allowed the brand to reinforce that normal people are beautiful just the way they are.

This was a wonderful piece of authentic storytelling and it has inspired us to drive ever greater meaning and purpose across the Accor brand portfolio.

Is the travel industry maturing in terms of marketing and becoming more sophisticated, if so, what has changed?

Yes, there has certainly been a massive shift in the last 5 to 10 years within the travel industry around the following themes:

• Shift from promotional to experiential – Travel industry branding and marketing has been historically built around a promise of safety and consistency to customers as they traveled around the world. Now consumers are looking for much more from brands. They are looking for brands to connect with them on a deeper level around shared passions, attitude to life and to deliver unique moments and experiences. So travel brands have had to evolve rapidly. For example, the attraction to ibis is no longer simply its great price point and reliable quality, but to ibis music – a promise of amazing live music experiences and the chance to commune with other travelers and locals who share a passion for the same.
• Recognize customer experience is marketing – In this social media fueled world, customer experience is the most powerful form of marketing we have. Hotel design has evolved from the cookie cutter template of the past to be a lot more surprising, inspiring and photogenic ‐ all of which encourages customers to amplify the brand and their own experiences of it. This trend has also driven the introduction of lifestyle hospitality brands, and Accor has been at the forefront in this regard. We’ve acquired brands such as 21c Museum Hotels, SLS, 25hours, Mama Shelter;  we’ve created new brands like JO&JOE and greet; and we’ve refreshed some brands such as Ibis Styles to reflect this shift in guest preferences.
• Data & personalization – For many years, guests traded their email addresses in exchange for the promises of discounts. In the hospitality industry, this trade‐off has been revolutionized. Today, in exchange for a personalized experiences, guests are willing to share more about themselves, their preferences, and their feedback, and in return, they trust their preferred hotel brands will use that information to give them tailored offers that will be relevant to their interests and their lifestyle, and to provide them with a personalized welcome when they return to their favorite hotels.  This is really what ALL is about, engaging in a two‐way relationship with our guests that goes beyond traditional marketing and which will make us more valuable to them.

How much has the concept of loyalty changed in the past decade and how do marketing campaigns take the changes into account?

Walter Landor once said that "products are built in factories; brands are built in the mind."

Hospitality and travel marketing have historically focused on the physical product and the vast majority of marketing campaigns in the last ten years have been focused on product‐centric advertising, which does not drive meaningful loyalty.

People don’t have relationships with products, they are loyal to brands. A customer’s perception of a brand is impacted not just through advertising or campaigns, but by every touch point across the customer journey.

So to drive true customer loyalty, marketing must expand and focus on the creation of a distinctive experience and deliver value across the entire customer experience.

Our global band campaign for Sofitel ‐ Live the French Way ‐ is a great example of this, where we bring to life the “Frenchness” of the brand, from the moment a guest arrives.

French greetings, fashion, design, scents, cuisine, wine, music – it’s all a way of wrapping the guest in a culturally authentic French experience, and then we go further, inviting guests to take a deeper dive with iconic, invitation-only events that celebrate the best of the French culture.

Do CMOs struggle to get buy‐in from the top?

Being a CMO is an immense privilege and at the same time a monumental challenge. CMOs have the opportunity to fundamentally transform an organization and are given the chance to inspire millions of customers and employees worldwide.

However, the breadth and complexity of the marketing function can lead to challenges with senior leadership if the priorities of marketing are not seen to be very closely supporting the business objectives of the group.

So there has to be a clear alignment on objectives and expectations with the CEO at all times.

The CMO ultimately has to deliver against those expectations while demonstrating the value and impact of the marketing function on an ongoing basis.

What are the greatest challenges of your role?

The sheer breadth of the CMO role is one of the most invigorating but also most challenging aspects of the position.

Historically there has been a huge amount of time and energy spent on broad, untargeted promotional advertising without any true understanding of the incremental revenue impact as well as the potential detrimental impact to brand perception.

Steven Taylor - Accor Hotels

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Accor operates in over 100 countries in 18 languages and offers close to 40 hospitality brands representing almost 5,000 hotels worldwide – our diversity and the breadth of our augmented hospitality platform is our strength and from a marketing perspective, it’s an amazing challenge to take this diversity and engage consumers around the variety of experiences and world‐class brands we deliver.

Another opportunity (and challenge) is the speed at which transformation is expected ‐ which requires not only a deep understanding of new and disruptive competitors but also the agility and willingness to disrupt yourself.

Accor has a strong entrepreneurial and innovative spirit and we fundamentally believe that if you’re not being disruptive consistently, then someone else is going to disrupt you first.

Understanding how the travel landscape will evolve and how we can position ourselves through new services, experiences, brands and technology developments, is an obsession at Accor.

Greet, which is our new eco‐centric brand, and our acquisitions of OneFineStay and John Paul demonstrate our willingness to disrupt, experiment and evolve our brand portfolio based on evolving consumer needs.

How do you prioritize between marketing to existing guests/customers or trying to attract new ones?

We look to engage and add value to customers throughout their journey and have distinct strategies to connect with both new & existing consumers.

• World‐class brands. Accor has the most comprehensive brand portfolio in travel so we invest a great deal of time and resources to position our world‐class brands as a way of acquiring new customers regardless of channel. We not only bring our brands to life though advertising but place a huge emphasis on creating a distinctive and vibrant in‐stay experience, which is of course is an incredibly important area in determining whether a customer is satisfied and whether they will return.
• New lifestyle loyalty program, ALL. We recently announced the relaunch of our new loyalty program, ALL, as a way of strengthening the value and relevance we deliver to our returning guests. This includes new benefits such as more status tiers, the ability to earn and redeem in our restaurants and bars worldwide, suite night upgrades, and so on. The biggest shift with ALL, is that now we can connect with our guests every day, rather than only when they are staying with us. We believe this gives us the chance to become much more relevant in the daily lives of consumers than ever before.

What’s your take on the Billboard Effect?

Targeting potential customers with time‐sensitive and relevant offers continues to be a valuable way of driving incremental share and revenue to a business.

Much of the research I have seen indicates that customers trust direct channels with their bookings more than third party sites, therefore there is a strong opportunity to position your hotel or brand in front of the right customer at the right time to deliver greater value for your business.

The key is to ensure you are addressing the right customer with the right product and the right message.  It’s a highly competitive environment and capturing attention of the customer can be a significant challenge.

Comparing marketing to, say, ten years ago to now ‐ how much of a difference is accessibility to data making?

Access to data is allowing us to deliver more value to consumers through personalized and contextual content and communications but also allowing us to enhance the hotel experience for our customers during their stays.

For example, at Fairmont, a guest can arrive and find a set of fitness gear and running shoes – in her (or his) size ‐ all ready to go in their guestroom

She knows that at Fairmont, she doesn’t have to go to the trouble of finding extra room in her carry-on for her gear and yet she can still get in a run with the help of a customized local running map or a guided route.

By gathering a few personal details, such as her workout preferences and shoe size, our employees can use that data to create personal, meaningful moments – this is where the magic happens in hospitality.

Access to actionable customer data can transform a guest’s stay, helping us to deliver an exceptional customer experience that a guest wants to return to, again and again.

What’s the biggest mistake in travel marketing you see made commonly?

Historically there has been a huge amount of time and energy spent on broad, untargeted promotional advertising without any true understanding of the incremental revenue impact as well as the potential detrimental impact to brand perception.

The last click attribution models which have and are still being used in the industry are over simplistic and reward the wrong type of activity.

We need to understand that the majority of customers are empowered to find the best price and we as an industry need to prioritize and focus on adding value to benefit the consumer across all touch points, rather than launching special offers or discounts at everyone.

Accor has made this shift in the last two‐three years, whereby we recognized that competing through price alone is a race to commoditization.

Customer experience is the most powerful form of marketing – when we focus on that, rather than on broad discount‐led campaigns, we are all better off.