Brand?

One of Digitas’ first high-profile forays into social media and branded content led them to create the online video program “The Smart Show” for Holiday Inn Express. I was a part of the brainstorming sessions that led to this concept. Additionally, I evolved my role as a copywriter to include working within the Brand & Account Planning department as a writer and strategist. I wrote this piece as a part of that department when they were getting ready to produce internal presentations about The Smart Show and enter the work into competition at Cannes and other venues. I was the only copywriter at Digitas to serve this dual function of both writer and brand planner/strategist.
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Background

Holiday Inn Express was the golden-haired stepchild of America’s iconic hotel brand, Holiday Inn. Created to appeal to the stripped down needs of mid-scale, frequent business travelers, HIEX was a hit from the start. Pragmatic businessmen fond of saving a buck appreciated the new chain’s value proposition: a clean, convenient, modern hotel equipped with just the basics. No frills and no fancy services to load up the bill.

HIEX’s success spawned a slew of economy-minded competitors and fueled the fastest growing sector in the hotel industry. But the new entrants looked eerily similar to Holiday Inn Express. Same architecture, same exterior lighting, same confident navy blue font. Even the names sounded interchangeable: Hampton Inn, Fairfield Inn, Comfort Inn.

Next came the amenities wars: the plush bedding wars, the free breakfast wars and the improved shower wars. Once a hotelier introduced a new feature, the others would scramble to trump it.

A sea of sameness enveloped the category.

And it threatened HIEX’s leadership position by forcing weary business travelers to choose among parity offerings. Brand loyalty went right out the window.

Our Challenge

Awareness wasn’t the issue. Holiday Inn Express has enjoyed higher brand awareness than others in it’s competitive set (Millward Brown). Our problem lay deeper in the purchase funnel ― in the area of brand consideration and brand preference ― where HIEX and its competitors have become equal.

We knew what we had to do. We had to lift HIEX out of the pack. But we had to do it by changing our approach, to one not based simply on functional, same-old-same-old product features.

Besides, in the rush to feature all those amenities, something wonderful about hotels had been overlooked (the good ones at least): knowing the customer.

A great hotel has a knack for knowing just the kind of life you live on the road and for delivering just the kind of experience you’re looking for, right? And that knowledge is communicated through the experiential and the emotional. It’s about the vibe, the tone, the style, the feeling you have before you even set foot in the hotel ― all of which is tricky because it’s less overt, less Marketing 101. But getting inside the head of your guests has long-lasting power because it goes much deeper than a soon-forgotten laundry list of amenities.

We wanted to re-introduce that feeling of being known and recognized by reclaiming the emotional relationship between “host” and “guest.” In essence,

Create an emotional, beyond-bullet-points connection between the brand and business travelers to help them feel good about choosing HIEX.

The target

Frequent business travelers are the lifeblood of the hotel industry. They keep the rooms full and the rates up during the weekdays when leisure travelers aren’t around.

But frequent business travelers have their own caste system. At the top are the elites ― privileged execs who travel in style, fly first class and stay at four star hotels. At the elite level, business travel feels like a perk.

And then there are the common, everyday road warriors. These folks are located right in the sweet spot of mid-scale hotels like HIEX. These are the hard working professionals who grind out business trips week in and week out, managing to a strict per diem.

For this segment, business travel is anything but cushy. And the obstacles to comfort and convenience just mount up: post-9/11 security checks, airport delays, oversold flights, pricey food and corporate cost-cutting conspire to make travel at this level feel like pain.

But road warriors are savvy and resilient. They’re salesmen, mid-level managers and entrepreneurs on their way up. They’re a fraternity and they look to veteran travelers to pass along tips of the trade. According to industry reports, today’s road warrior tends to skew Gen X, a generation known for its pragmatism and resourcefulness.

We wanted to get to know them better. Qualitative research showed us that seasoned road warriors have a strong work hard/play hard attitude. They’re fiercely independent and pride themselves on being self-reliant.

They have business travel down to a science.

The key to understanding the mindset of the modern day road warrior is that they pride themselves on beating the system.

Success in this game means being SMART and using your wits to overcome the challenges that you meet on the road. Finding innovative and tricky ways of beating the system is the road warrior’s badge of honor.

Our strategy and how we got it done

We wanted to engage the hearts and minds of road warriors by inviting them to help us discover everything that is smart about being on the road in America ― and to have some fun along the way.

In TV-Land, HIEX had already established a quirky, savvy personality with their beloved “But I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night” campaign.

However, through our research, we learned that nearly 50% of Gen-Xers spend significant time viewing online content ― videos, blogs, product reviews, etc.¹ And knowing our Gen-X road warriors as we do, we also realized the importance of reaching them in a way that fit the on-the-go nature of their lives, and not the more structured set-up of scheduled TV broadcasts.

As a result of these insights, we chose to extend the HIEX personality into new online channels of distribution. And to that end, we created a continuous online webisode that invited today’s road warriors to discover everything that is smart, unexpected and yes, quirky in an unscripted road trip across America. In Hollywood, we’d call it “Jon Stewart meets Jack Kerouac”. In our world, we call it The SMART Show.

Right from the start, we knew that, for the SMART Show to help increase the emotional connection between HIEX and business travelers, we needed to get a conversation started. We did this by asking them to help us choose a co-host for the newly created show (The show’s main host was picked from hundreds of actor/comedians).

We reached out to potential co-hosts and viewers through growing (or exploding, as the case may be) social networking and information/video-sharing Web sites, including:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Wikipedia
• Blogs
• Youtube

We received hundreds of amusing, entertaining and, okay, some embarrassing video auditions. Then we gave America a chance to view the videos in all their glory on a highly interactive miscrosite, where they could comment, blog and, by joining the SMART Show community, vote for their favorite personalities.

With 4,000 viewers registering to be in the SMART Show community and thousands more visiting the microsite to watch co-host audition videos, the buzz factor reached a crescendo with the final choice (made by the community) of a co-host.

When it came time to actually produce the SMART Show, we energized partnerships with two media brands that our target audience was very familiar with: AOL and HBO. This gave us the scale and technical capabilities to create the show on-the-run, yet with very high production values.

But we didn’t rely on the microsite alone to distribute this content. Again, we thought like the big media skeptical, savvy Gen-Xers we were targeting and partnered with some key online content distributors:

• BlipTV
• Revver
• iTunes
• MySpace
• Vech

This gave us the more targeted reach we needed to really engage with today’s road warriors.

What did it all do for Holiday Inn Express?

We succeeded in our main mission: to reach and engage business travelers with the goal of increasing their brand preference for HIEX.

By the end of the SMART Show’s run:

• 271,000 people visited the SMART Show microsite
• 122,000 people watched the SMART Show via the microsite
• 192,000 people watched the SMART Show via other online distribution partners
• 53% of SMART Show visitors were male
• 51% of SMART Show visitors stayed for business more than once in the past year
• 44% of visitors were more likely to stay at HIEX after seeing an episode of the SMART Show
• 76% of return visitors were more likely to stay at HIEX after seeing an episode of the SMART Show

Overall, response to the SMART Show demonstrated a stellar 72% positive net impact on occupancy and stay behavior.

A final tidbit:

During the post-casting portion of the SMART Show’s run, 1/3 of all visitors arrived at the show on the recommendation of a friend. Remember how we said road warriors look to veteran travelers for tips of the trade? Seems like that kind of word of mouth was in full effect for the SMART Show.

HIEX must really know its customers.

1 Forrester Research Social Technographics Trends Report April 2007