RoseWood Hotels & Resorts
RoseWood Hotels & Resorts: Branding to increase customer profitability and lifetime value. Rosewood Hotels& Resorts(Rosewood) , a private hotel management company started in 1979, that built a global reputation with iconic luxury hotels such as The Mansion and The Carlyle, became well known for its ability to enhance a property’s value by creating unique, one-of-a-kind properties with a small ultra-luxury residential style. But amidst this, the brand ROSEWOOD became muted, unmentioned. The issue here is to establish Rosewood as a true brand.
A branding decision is to be made to establish the company’s future. Rosewood with or without a corporate brand needs to be evaluated in order to arrive at a decision. The first thing is-whether or not a corporate branding. * Establishing a corporate brand would mean to fall into the same league where other corporate brands were in. Rosewood without a corporate branding was at par with the branded ones. Its occupancy rate across years has been almost the same for- be it The Marriott or The Four Seasons Hotels, inspite of relatively higher prices at RoseWood. Moreover, it would mean to keep the brand promise across the properties – by ensuring perfect product/service performance across the portfolio, internal soft branding initiatives and significant marketing investment. But keeping in mind the uniqueness of each Rosewood hotel and their “SENSE OF PLACE” philosophy, consistent brand-wide performance standards seems a bit unrealistic. Each place has something new and unique to offer its guests. Standardizing it was not the Rosewood way of work. They understood the customer needs according to their functioning place and believed in offering the same.
This was their Unique Selling Point and diverting from this would mean a high impact on the customer expectation. A corporate branding is not the only solution to increasing the customer profitability and lifetime value. Surely Rosewood needs cross-property increase. Seeing RoseWood’s statistics, upto 40% customers come back to the same hotel of Rosewood’s But only 5% are involved in cross property usage. In the individual brand range, they typically had 5-10% cross property usage rate and this number went upto 10-15% In case of corporate-branded hotels.
But RoseWood was struggling at a mere rate of 5%- the lowermost rate even in the individual brand range. So they need to boost up this number to at least gain the higher edge in their own category of individual brands. I would suggest these short term course of action so as to achieve higher customer profitability and lifetime value. 1. People definitely like being at RoseWood- keeping in mind their occupancy rate (average of 60% for last 3 years) and 40% customers coming back again to the same hotel. Customers are happy to be at RoseWood properties.
But little can they relate with other RoseWood hotels. The RoseWood hotel they go to provides them with a comfortable stay. When their guests go to a new place that also has a RoseWood property, they should know what to expect and those who liked it first will definitely want to have the same comfortable stay again. For e. g. A Mc-Donalds store worldwide is known for the food they provide. When going in a Mc-D they know what to expect and what level of food they will get. But even a Mc-D store in Gujarat has customized itself according to the place they are at and provides only vegetarian there.
RoseWood’s main strength is their uniqueness. But they need to build an inter relation among their hotels so that they maintain almost same level of service and comfort. People should go in to experience something new but with the faith of same level of service. 2. When a customer checks-out from a RoseWood property, they can be asked to fill a small interactive feedback form and a satisfied customer should be handed with a handout of other RoseWood hotels with a promise that they can have the same satisfaction of stay there as well. . RoseWood can implement that when a guest leaves, he is made aware of other RoseWood hotels with a provision that whenever they are to go to a place having another of RoseWood’s hotels, they can just contact the manager of their regular RoseWood hotel staff/manager and all arrangements for their stay at that place can be made beforehand as per the guests convenience. Also, by this the customers would not go to a new place and make choices whether or not to turn up to RoseWood hotel at that place.
They could implement the branding in a bit subtle way like The Mansion-from the house of RoseWood or The Mansion (RoseWood properties) so that people can be aware of and relate to them. 5. They need to collaborate more with the travel agents. They do promote the hotel but not the brand. Educating the customers about RoseWood as well along with the hotel would help the customers to relate and entrust in them. 6. Even the guests who have stayed in RoseWood hotels do not know of RoseWood as a brand.
They need to bring the guests’ focus on RoseWood as well during their stay. Logo and promotion should be moved towards higher profile amenities as well. Their conversations on telephone to the dress of the staff should justify that they are a part of the RoseWood. As far as the long term initiative is concerned, being a status symbol never hurts. In Fact it is the need of the hour to be a leader in the competition. So, they might as well like to go for corporate branding if willing to compromise on their “Sense Of Place” philosophy to some extent.
