the hotelier

Kevin Kowalski
Golf and the art of branding
Summer 2007

KEVIN KOWALSKI is vice president, brand management, Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts, North America, for InterContinental Hotels Group PLC of the United Kingdom.

MPG: Why is Crowne Plaza “The Place to Meet?”
Kowalski: Starting in 2003 we decided to focus on the groups and meetings segment as the most important business segment for our brand – for a variety of reasons. One is that for a full service, upscale brand, it’s the largest segment of your revenues. For us it’s about 40% of our total. The other reason is we have well established, upscale competitors who focus heavily on the business travelers. Rather than go head to head with those bigger brands, we decided to focus on a business segment that was every bit as important and really be able to provide some leadership in going after that segment effectively.

In 2003 we rolled out some service initiatives in our hotels that would provide a better experience for both the meeting planners and their attendees. All of our hotels have a brand promise statement that every employee memorizes that’s about providing a better meeting experience.

What is included in those initiatives?
We rolled out a two-hour response guarantee for meeting planners which simply says we will respond with a proposal to all RFP’s within two hours with dates, rates and space. The second component was a new position within our hotels called the Crowne’s Meeting Director. That is not your “red coat gopher,” to use another brand’s example, but an experienced and certified meetings professional - the go to person for the meeting planner and their on site facilitator.

For the attendees, in 2004 we rolled out our own bedding program and worked with a sleep doctor, Michael Breus, to create a better overall sleeping environment, not just nicer mattresses, to enable our guests to sleep better.

This is the first year for your company to serve as the title sponsor for the Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial. Tell us how your company reached this decision.
Continuing the story of our focus on meetings and our discipline in research, we identified a target that we call the “meeting initiator.” Our research told us that meeting planners are obviously an important decision maker in selecting the venue hotel. We also learned that the meetings initiator, the person that says “I need to have a meeting,” is also an important decision maker, including the choice of venues. Many meeting initiators tend to be golf fanatics. They have a real passion for golf – both as players and as fans.

We thought that golf would be a great affinity marketing platform to reach that target customer and began meeting with the PGA tour almost a year ago.

We chose the Colonial Invitational because, historically, this is one of the better events on the PGA tour and has more heritage and tradition than any event except for The Masters. Sixty one years at the same venue, Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, and it’s associated with one of the great legends of the game, Ben Hogan. It’s instant credibility in the golf space and provides a great anchor for this platform.

It includes a TV campaign that delivers on our meetings message, and a promotion that culminates with an event here at Colonial called Crowne Plaza’s Amateur Invitational at Colonial. Seventy-two lucky winners will be treated like a pro for a day. All of our hotels have embraced golf as a marketing platform. Our key cards have the tournament logo. We have a program in partnership with Coca-Cola and Jack Daniels where we have created golf “signature” drinks. A whole host of activities are happening at our hotels to reinforce our golf platform.

How are you measuring your return-on-investment of this campaign?
There are components that are easy and there are components that are not so easy. The ROI for the promotion I mentioned is easy to measure because it’s during a finite period and you can measure incremental business delivered to your hotels.

When it comes to broadcast advertising, it’s incredibly hard. That’s one of the bigger spending components in our overall golf platform that includes this event, the TV, the promotion and the in hotel stuff. Crowne Plaza signed a six-year deal to sponsor this event so we plan on using golf as our marketing platform for at least that many years.

If our business is strong, our customers are happy and this seems to be a good association over the next couple of years, then we’ll know we have chosen the right strategy and we’ll continue down this path.

Within your company, who pitched the idea to whom?
Our global leadership is in Windsor in the UK but our largest operating region, by far, is the Americas which is led by Steve Porter. My immediate boss is Mark Wells, the senior vice president of brand performance. I got Mark on board, Mark and I got Steve on board and then Steve served it up to the board over in the UK.

This is a major commitment. Was there much opposition to your idea?
Over the last five years, we have a track record of making some good decisions within the Crowne Plaza brand starting with “The Place to Meet,” our service initiatives, and our sleep advantage program. When I started we had about 89 hotels in the U.S. and about 160 around the world. Now we have 280 worldwide.

All of the decisions we’ve made over the last several years have produced positive performance results both in terms of adding hotels but also in terms of performance at our hotels. Our company got pretty comfortable that we were headed down the right path, so they were very supportive.

Your TV campaign includes six golf celebrities sitting around a boardroom talking golf. Tell us how that idea was developed.
We bought all of our TV media on golf tournaments throughout the PGA tour season. We knew we were going to have a golfing audience and thought since the brand is “the place to meet,” and the golf course is the informal place to meet - more deals are done on the golf course than in any boardroom - we thought there was a natural strategic connection to using golf in our messaging.

We wanted to highlight the fact that we are the place to meet and we throw great meetings and we wanted to somehow integrate golf into that message. The concept that came to the forefront was taking celebrities who are golfers like Alice Cooper and George Lopez, people in the golfing world like David Feherty, Natalie Gulbis, Dan Jenkins right here in Fort Worth, and Lee Trevino and putting them in a Crowne Plaza having a great meeting.

In advertising, first you try to engage your target audience and then you try to deliver your brand message. We knew our audience was interested in golf, so we had this “cast of characters” talk about the same water cooler topics that golf fans talk about with their buddies. Is golf technology getting too good? What your favorite superstition? What’s going on with the Ryder Cup? The same things that people that like golf talk about when they are hanging out with their buddies or at the 19th hole. What we did was throw topics on the table to this group and we had them talk about them completely unscripted and we captured some pretty special moments.

It is totally unscripted and I think it comes through in the spots. They are extremely engaging and deliver our brand message - people having a great meeting at a Crowne Plaza.

Your company and your individual properties selected Cure for the Kids Cancer Coalition as your official charity. Could you talk about that for a bit?
The PGA tour is very interested in charity. The whole organization focuses on raising money for charities through their tournaments. There a lot of great charities associated with Colonial - many of them are here in Fort Worth like the Cook Children’s Medical Center. We wanted to find a way to continue with that theme of making this event and our support of golf really focused on community service. We also wanted to make it relevant for our hotels throughout the country so we partnered with the Cure for Kids Cancer Coalition because it is a national organization. It has linkage with a lot of children’s hospitals where we have hotels and it gave our hotels a great charity to rally around to help their local community.

We are in the hospitality business. Our business is all about taking care of people each and every night and we wanted to extend that to really taking care of an important charity.