PROJECT: Belmond Hotel Group
How might we attract and engage with HENRY (High earning not yet rich yet) millennials customers by delivering ‘morning taster experiences’ in Peru, that could result in these customers transitioning to returning customers with a strong lifetime value?
CLIENT: RCA/ Belmond Hotel Group
RCA GROUP: Ally Rosam, Jonathan Martell, Yi Wu, Francesca Schiboni Grimaldi
The Brief:
We were tasked with creating a truly differentiated experience for Belmond by focusing on the morning experience. Belmond wished to distinguish themselves from other hotels, all of whom focus on the fine dining, and room experience of the night. Belmond wish to complement the excellence of the evening with a unique morning experience. The primary customer was Millennials/Generation Y who are coming to a Belmond Hotel, perhaps as a couple, to disconnect or because they are seeking to achieve some very specific goal.
Most luxury hotels don’t focus on the morning part of the experience. However, Belmond wanted to complement the excellence of the evening with a unique morning experience. Put simply they want to be famous for mornings.
The Design Problem:
The digital revolution of the hotel industry meant that prior to the late 90’s/ early noughties hotels didn’t have much competition. They were slow to respond when the innovators and metasearch engines were created, but are now being forced to react as they are losing market share. Not only is the landscape changing but so too are the actors.
Millennials make up more than ⅓ of the World’s hotel guests and are anticipated to reach 50% by 2020. Their new purchasing patterns and social behaviours has meant that hotel brands; particularly luxury hotel brands have to reinvent themselves and their approach to engage with this group. Millennials want an active vacation that is purposeful: 85% of whom will check multiple sites before they book. They also place more value on travelling and new experiences than tangible items, with 72% preferring to spend their money on experiences, which makes it particularly challenging for luxury hotel brands.
The Barriers:
We identified High Earning Not Rich Yet (HENRY) millennials as our target customers who were challenging to reach.
The Process:
In an attempt to begin understand the travel and hotel landscape we carried out desk based research, interviewed luxury hotel managers and millennial bloggers who we connected with through social media platforms. We proceeded to develop personas based on these interviews and used tools such as 'Jobs to be done' and 'A day in the life of' to help deepen our understanding of their needs.
Creating persona
Jobs to be done
Key insights:
Foreigners: Value for money, Internal conflict: spending time in the hotel vs spending time exploring the area, Location and Experiencing the local culture
Locals: Maintaining normal routine, Quality inexpensive accommodation and being Happier to spend money on unique experiences.
We used these key insights to guide and inform our ideation and used techniques such as 'Crazy 8's' and how would big brands like 'Disney' and 'Apple' approach this.
The output:
We proposed a change in direction to the current Belmond approach. At present Belmond experiences are marketed around their physical presence; properties, trains, boats etc and the ‘sleeping’ experience is prioritised, however this is at odds with what millennials want. We proposed that the experiences should be prioritised/ of equal measure to the room rates.They should be marketed as the feelings you want to create around an experience as opposed to the components of the experience. Millennials want to spend money on experiences as opposed to tangible goods, therefore are more inclined to spend money on a great ‘unique’ experience as opposed to somewhere to sleep. Therefore our approach was to prioritise the ‘experience’ above the room/ property.
Our short-term aim was to create unique, personalised and local experiences, enabling more millennials to experience Belmond and in turn share compelling stories, attractive photos and videos, resulting in more millennials engaging with and relating to the brand. Millennial Henrys are becoming the most affluent group, holding a huge influence over the entire Millennial generation.
In the longer-term the memorable experiences will stay with them, resulting in these millennial customers returning to other Belmond properties once they become more affluent.
We created a 'Toolkit' to help millennial staff at Belmond Hotels to create 'Morning Taster Experiences.'
