Mike Mueller, Vice President of Loyalty, Marketing & Partnerships, Wyndham Hotel Group participated in an enlightening Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss the company’s new umbrella advertising campaign, customer loyalty, customer engagement, and customer experience.
What prompted the launch of this campaign and what are your goals?
At Wyndham Hotel Group, we have two customers we need to satisfy: guests who stay at our hotels and our franchisees. In terms of guests, consumers told us they didn’t know that our 12 featured brands are connected in any way−that they’re all part of one family and connected by the Wyndham Rewards loyalty program. In focus groups, people could often identify two, three and sometimes four brands in the Wyndham Hotel Group family but when we showed them all our brands, the feedback was, overwhelmingly, “Wow, I had no idea!” We acknowledge that very sentiment in the opening line of our new 30-second TV spot: “People all over the world know us, but they don’t yet know we’re a family.” We often heard that if consumers knew we were a family of brands, they’d be more apt to concentrate their share of wallet within our network rather than distributing it among us and our competitors.
From a franchisee perspective, many of our larger brands like Days Inn and Super 8 have used television in their media mix for years, but most of our other brands didn’t have the budget to participate in broadcast media. Our commitment to help franchisees realize more direct-booked business led us to the conclusion that if we combined a portion of each brand’s marketing resources, we could compete more aggressively in broadcast and online media while raising awareness for all our brands. The goal is simple: drive incremental direct bookings to all our brands through this “umbrella” campaign relative to what they have historically achieved under a brand-specific marketing strategy.
How will this impact customer loyalty, engagement, and experience?
The Wyndham Rewards loyalty program is the glue that binds all our brands. When conceptualizing the strategy for this campaign, we asked ourselves one question: Why should a potential customer care that we are a family of brands? The diversity of brands is not necessarily a compelling message to all consumers, especially to the casual traveler.
With over 7,500 locations around the world, Wyndham Hotel Group can satisfy the hotel needs of almost any kind of traveler. Now, wrap that impressive distribution with our Guaranteed Rewards brand promise, where even an infrequent traveler can earn enough loyalty points for a real, tangible reward after just one qualified stay, and the picture is painted. Wyndham Rewards provides consumers with a powerful reason to care. We believe that when consumers start to experience the breadth of our portfolio, the depth of our rewards and the ease of achieving them, we will have attracted a whole new loyal customer set.
Is this the biggest national campaign launched by Wyndham Rewards?
This is the first time Wyndham Hotel Group brought together all of its hotel brands and loyalty program in a single consumer-facing national television and digital advertising campaign. We have sold all our brands through our Global Sales team efforts, on our websites and in our call centers, through our third-party distribution partners and other B2B activities for years, but we needed to establish more of a direct dialogue with consumers to explain our multi-brand value proposition. And while Wyndham Rewards is the call to action for the campaign, the focus is on the individual brands, their relationships with each other and Wyndham Rewards, and the fact that we have products to satisfy diverse travel needs.
Brands like Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, Days Inn and Travelodge have long legacies – people know these names. But we also have other great brands like Wingate by Wyndham, Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham and Baymont Inn & Suites that are not necessarily household names. By pooling marketing resources, we can continue to invest in our established brands while providing a lift in awareness for the growing brands.
It was also critical that we make a strong impression with this first-ever “umbrella” campaign. That’s why we are honored to have the renowned actor John Goodman provide the voice for our TV spots. His instantly recognizable voice has appeal across all demographics and provides significant credibility to the campaign and to our family of brands.
How were the specific programs chosen?
We wanted a vehicle to showcase all our brands: The creative does that. We wanted to provide consumers with a compelling reason to care and consider us: We believe we accomplished that by positioning Wyndham Rewards as the glue that connects everything. But we still had to satisfy the objective of driving incremental direct bookings to our channels and hotels – or, to put another way, to create a reason for people to care today. The offer that we included as part of this campaign–where travelers can save up to 25% and earn Wyndham Rewards bonus points when they book at www.wyndhamrewards.com– is designed to reward consumers for booking directly with our brands, using Wyndham Rewards as the mechanism to deliver the rewards in the form of bonus points
Moving forward, what metrics will be used to track success of the program?
The true measure of success is whether consumers like what they see and trust our brands enough to commit their spend. Naturally, we will measure all the transactional results including web traffic, call center volume, conversion in all channels and revenue generated for our franchisees. But we will also give attention to qualitative metrics like brand and portfolio awareness, likelihood to recommend, brand opinion and ad recall.
As a marketer, what things/challenges keep you up at night?
Besides my one-month old baby girl?! I spend a lot of time thinking about how we effectively communicate to guests and Wyndham Rewards members going forward. We see that the usefulness of email as a marketing tool continues to wane; the effectiveness of SMS marketing in North America is questionable; and few seem to have cracked the code on social media commercialization (except the social media outlets themselves). So, it’s key for us to create as compelling a story as possible so consumers give us permission to continue the dialogue with them.
From a loyalty perspective, there is a lot of buzz about the taxability of rewards currency. This could have devastating effects on loyalty programs and puts their future in jeopardy. Can you imagine having to declare earned loyalty points as taxable income? Members may voluntarily resign from loyalty programs and attracting new members will be extremely challenging. There–I have officially caused myself another sleepless night!