Duke Greenhill, founder & CEO of Greenhill Partners, details how social and new media can be used to drive luxury hospitality brand loyalty
DIGITAL
A Day In the Life of the Digitised Hotel
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Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Duke Greenhill, founder & CEO of Greenhill Partners, details how social and new media can be used to drive luxury hospitality brand loyalty
The Standard, New York City
Duke Greenhill, founder & CEO of Greenhill Partners, details how social and new media can be used to drive luxury hospitality brand loyalty
High-end hotels are the ideal proving ground for social and digital media. Both are uniquely useful in enhancing customer service and luxury brand equity. Still, most upmarket brands are scared stiff that the accessibility of digital media dilutes the exclusivity essential to luxury branding… but they are wrong.
Yes, exclusivity is an intrinsic luxury brand value, but so is personalization. No traditional platform offers prestige brands the same potential as social and digital media when it comes to personalising a customer experience. With that in mind, here is a day in the life of a guest at a “digitized” luxury hotel. Or rather, real-life examples of how luxury hotels should leverage social and new media to cultivate greater brand loyalty and equity.
“ No traditional platform offers prestige brands the same potential as social and digital media when it comes to personalising a customer experience ”
7 AM PST: You hop on a flight from LA to New York. Before take-off, you tweet, “Headed to NYC. Looking 4ward to drink poolside @LuxuryNYCHotel.” When you land and turn your mobile on, you have a Twitter response from @ LuxuryNYCHotel.
It reads, “We look forward to having you. Shall we reserve you a lounge chair?” The number one cause of customer dissatisfaction in the luxury hotel business is a lack of immediate staff attention. This is why the primary gauge for determining a hotels star rating is its staff-to-guest ratio. With a simple tweet, the hotel has made that ratio moot, and provided you with immediate, personalized solutions for your desires. Not a bad start.
1 PM EST: You deplane at JFK, grab your bags, and head out to the taxi cue. You tweet, “Ugh. Never going to get a taxi. Line is miles long!” Your hotel has already followed your Twitter account (a standard procedure for incoming guests), and will continue to do so until you check out. The hotel responds, “Shall we send a car for you?” You know that Dial7 is about the same price from JFK as a taxi, so you say, “Yes,” and within minutes, the hotel has ordered the town car and you’re on your way long before the sods in the taxi line.
The Plaza, New York City, allows guests to experience the hotel through its bespoke iPad application
2 PM: Upon check-in, you are provided an iPad pre-loaded with the hotel’s branded app. It offers the concierge’s suggestions for dining, entertainment and sightseeing, and provides quick-access to purchase theatre tickets, transportation, room service and more. You take it up to your room where you find a handwritten note on your pillow.
(Yes, there is still a place for traditional personalization in the digital hotel). The note reads, “Thank you for finding us tweet-worthy. Please use the enclosed for a free poolside drink. Your lounge chair has been reserved.”
3 PM: You’re showered and feeling better. You wish you didn’t have to go that darn meeting. You use the iPad to send a quick message to the concierge, and when you step off the elevator, a taxi is already waiting for you.
5 PM: The meeting is over, and you’re feeling the physical effects of cross-continent travel and corporate meetings. You catch happy hour poolside with you private lounger and free drink (though you buy one or two more). You tweet, “Long day. Thinking about a massage @ LuxuryNYCHotel spa tomorrow before I fly home.”
“ Yes, there is still a place for traditional personalisation in the digital hotel ”
7 PM: When you arrive back in your room, you notice you have a message on your hotel iPad. You open it, and it takes you directly to one of the hotel’s Facebook videos. The video illustrates the hotel’s spa offerings. Beneath the video is a “click to reserve spa treatment” button. You do. And before setting the iPad down, you use the hotel’s custom app to select and reserve a table at a recommended restaurant. You shower again, change, head downstairs, and again, the taxi is waiting for you.
11 PM: You arrive back in your room after a long day. Your bed is turned down, and again, on your pillow, is a hand-written note. It reads, “We’re sorry that you’re leaving tomorrow, but if you like, please text your airline and confirmation number to 212-555-5555 and we’ll have your boarding passes waiting when you check out.”
9 AM THE NEXT DAY: You’re awake, refreshed, and satisfied by the room service breakfast you scheduled the previous night on your hotel iPad. You have your massage, then head downstairs where the hotel’s staff hands you an envelope with your boarding passes. You reluctantly return the iPad to them, after a one-click checkout process via their custom app, and head to the waiting taxi.
“ You feel special, and in the world of luxury service branding, “special” is the name of the game ”
10:30 AM: As you board your flight you tweet, “Wonderful time in NYC at @LuxuryNYCHotel but glad to be headed home.” When you land at LAX, you notice you have a tweet. It’s from the hotel! “We loved having you. When you visit again please use code XYZ for a complimentary upgrade. Thx, @ LuxuryNYCHotel.”
You think to yourself, “I will definitely stay there again.” Through a cost-effective and streamlined process of integrating social and digital media into their customer experience, the hotel succeeded in providing you quick and personalized treatment.
You don’t know that there was only one person in the hotel offices managing all the tweets and iPad requests from the current guests. You don’t know that, operationally speaking, it’s far cheaper for the hotel to provide customer service this way. None of that matters to you. You feel special, and in the world of luxury service branding, “special” is the name of the game.
Founder / CEO
Duke is a leading creative and strategist for luxury digital marketing and branding. With a focus on authentic brand narratives (the “stories” of brands), Duke has become recognized as an innovative, strategic and creative professional with the unique ability to drastically increase the value of luxury brands as business assets. From Hollywood to the White House to Ivy League halls and Madison Avenue, Duke’s experience and success in virtually ever media arena has taught him how to develop authentic, effective campaigns, and has led him to founding New York City’s premiere luxury brand-specific consultancy, Greenhill + Partners. He has created over 300 award-winning campaigns, produced three independent feature films, and written on assignment for publications like the New York Times, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Harvard Review, Media Maker Magazine, Filmmaker and many others. He has won Telly awards, Pollie awards, MTV awards and a film-short Academy Award nomination. As a chief creative at Washington, D.C.’s, illustrious Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm media agency, Duke worked on prestigious presidential and corporate image campaigns. As the principal producer for In Media Res Films, he produced and marketed Hollywood films. And as founder and executive creative director of Greenhill + Partners, Duke has worked in front of and behind the scenes on campaigns for such lauded clients as Chanel, Ritz-Carlton, the Government of Monaco, Adidas, Fairmont Hotels, HBO, countless fashion and hospitality brands and many more. Duke is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin’s school of Communications (Bachelors), and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Film and Media (Masters).
