Marketing Objectives:
Clearly state your marketing goals.
What did your company strive to achieve using this piece or program?
More than half of smartphone owners now use their devices for travel-related activities and, according to Google, 74% of people have at least 1 travel app on their device. Therein lies the opportunity for Marriott to engage with travelers on the platforms where they are most active. With our apps, we wanted to simplify the user experience, deliver enhanced services, increase bookings, and give guests an app they love. For example, Members will engage with the app’s new interface that features an innovative “one-button” ergonomic design. Inspired by observing travelers as they dashed through airports, balancing their phone in one hand and luggage in the other, the new design offers simple thumb-tap access to everything the app has to offer. Our app is available in 6 languages so this launch was global in nature. To introduce the app, we created an entire new visual identity for a integrated marketing campaign that consisted of owned, earned, paid media, and a global app sweepstakes.
Target Audience:
Who was/is the target audience?
Characterize the composition, size, and location of your target audience.
Extensive customer research and member feedback are driving the redesigned mobile app experience and will continue to do so as part of Marriott’s ongoing service innovation strategy.
The Marriott apps are available for members of our loyalty programs. The programs and apps are free to join and guests can start enjoying benefits immediately upon downloading and signing-in.
Prior to our app, we already had an existing user base of over 2M unique monthly users. That user base was our primary target audience. In addition, acquiring new app users who are actively browsing, booking and have upcoming stays.
The Win Free Travel for Life Sweepstakes focused on driving usage of the app by giving users who booked, check-in, or made a mobile request an entry to win enough points to enjoy free travel. Our innovative approach to this promotion ensure that the sweepstakes was solely centered around the app by automatically enrolling customers that use the app.
Research, Planning, and Implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign? Describe how you planned and produced the creative asseets with the mobile canvas in mind.
Our creative strategy involved bringing the apps new amazing User Experience Design to life via the marketing touchpoint. The new Marriott apps have a very distinctive look and feel - we wanted the creative to pull through the same fonts, imagery, and overall design style that users would experience when using the app. Our creative teams developed standardized iconography, nomenclature of all features, translations, logos, and imagery to produce a brand guide that was utilized by our marketing teams at headquarters as well as in the field to maintain a consistent marketing message for the new apps. The incentive layer featuring a promotion centered around driving home the message that customers that use our app could win free travel for life. This promotion was run upon app launch for a duration of 3 months, registered several hundred thousand members and helped drive usage and trial of the new app and its most important guest service features.
Message:
What is the key message intended for the piece/campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?
Our mobile apps are designed to cater to our guests’ needs before, during, and after their stay. We know our customers are traveling with mobile devices, expect to communicate with us in easy and innovative ways, and expect a level of service whether in person or digitally. This position our apps as the best channel to facilitate a meaningful service experience for our guests, making travel easier.
Our app is designed to do the following at scale globally across over 6,700 hotels:
-Easily book and manage reservations
-Enables guests to check-in before they arrive
-Send guests real-time room ready alerts
-Allow guests to send amenity requests and track them in the app
-Chat directly with hotels
-Manage your loyalty account, track points, Elite nights, and more
Our marketing campaign featured an innovative mobile sweepstakes, Win Free Travel for Life by auto-enrolling guests for a chance win when they used mobile check-in, mobile requests and booked in our app.
Results:
Which of your original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns.
Our redesigned apps and marketing campaign are achieving tremendous results for the company. We are seeing huge boosts to our bottom line goals, usage rate of app features, downloads, and active users. The marketing campaign has been a huge success in pulling together the right voice to support the app, drive users via the sweepstakes, and generate awareness for the launch of this revolutionary product.
-Our Monthly Active Users increased ~40%
-Revenue is seeing double digit growth
-Mobile Check-ins have spiked to over 260K per week
-Usage of Mobile Requests and Chat has spiked 500%
-Our app store rating almost doubled, with customers signaling their love for the app, its design, features, and ease of use.
We're on pace to drive more downloads in 2018, we have witnessed hundreds of thousands of customers participate in the sweeps and drove bottom line results across the board for our mobile program.
Project Analysis:
Please provide a brief background on the project and your efforts to preserve the destination’s natural, cultural and historic heritage.
Objectives and Goals:
What did organization set out to achieve in undertaking this project?
Creativity and Innovation:
What new and innovative ideas did you incorporate in either your method of outreach or in the implementation of the project that you think could inspire others committed to sustainability in the tourism and travel industry?
Communication:
How did you communicate your actions to the public, the media and other key stakeholders and what was the aim of the message?
How did you generate publicity in order to build awareness of, or support corporate values on your sustainability initiatives.
Results:
How did you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and what direct and tangible results did you achieve?
Leadership:
Please list the individual in a leadership role responsible for the project and how would you characterize their commitment to promoting preservation and sustainability best practices in the travel and tourism industry?
Division
Integrated Marketing Campaign
Sub-category
Integrated Marketing Campaign
Category
Integrated Marketing Campaign
Entry Title
Marriott Mobile Apps
Innovation Analysis: Please provide a brief background on the project and why you feel it fits the definition of innovation, what the breakout implications are and how it was an industry disruptor.
Sources of Innovation: Did the innovative project result from chance, from research, from inspiration from outside the industry, or from some other source?
Goals and Objectives: What were the goals of the innovative project, and were they met? Were they tied to a business plan? A larger campaign? Or to get specific result (such as views, shares, influencer engagement, or bookings)? And what obstacles did you encounter in the execution of the project and how did you overcome them?
Situational Analysis
Based on actual hands-on guest research and feedback, Marriott International now offer all members a dynamic mobile experience personalized for them through the Marriott Rewards, The Ritz-Carlton and SPG app. Marriott is digitizing every moment throughout the guest’s travel journey—thinking about travel, planning a trip, staying with us, and finishing up on a trip—to make their experiences more personalized and seamless, while enhancing the human interactions we have with guests through digital.
The new Marriott apps breaks the mold of typical hospitality apps, by going beyond transactions and one-size-fits-all content. Our apps simplify the travel experience, while allowing guests to customize their hotel stay. Loyalty members use the app to find and book a stay, check-in, receive room ready alerts, access a mobile key, and checkout. The app’s industry-leading Mobile Requests feature allows guests to chat directly the hotel and send amenity request, anytime, anywhere.
Research, planning, and implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign?
Describe how you planned and produced the creative assets with the mobile canvas in mind.
Message:
What is the key messages intended for the piece/ campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?
What helped you breakthrough on mobile?
Results:
What original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign?
Entrants should provide quantifiable metrics tied to real business results (eg brand lift, leads, or bookings generated).
Results:
How did you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and what direct and tangible results did you achieve? Please be as specific as possible and share the full impact of your efforts in CSR. Understandably, maintenance is another major part of CSR. If you have continued to actively and consistently work on your CSR process; please add those actions to your results description.
Leadership:
To keep your CSR efforts thriving, you need momentum and passion, which has to come from the top. Please list the individual in a leadership role responsible for the project and how would you characterize their commitment to promoting corporate social responsibility in the travel and tourism industry?