InterContinental Hotels - Global Branding Suite Success

Leading Global Brands Bulletin

http://www.effectivebrands.com

In the last year, over 60 global brand executives have
participated in an exciting learning project on Leading
Global Brands. All participants are the CEO, Chief
Marketing Officer, or Global Brand Director of a global
brand. They all share a desire to be thought leaders in
developing ideas and best practices for leading the
global brands of the future.

InterContinental Hotels - Global Branding Suite Success

This Bulletin features a discussion between EffectiveBrands
(EB) and Peter Gowers of InterContinental Hotels Group. It
talks about the challenges of global brand development,
global activation in a franchise service model, and inspiring
brand-building behaviours throughout an organization.\

Peter Gowers joined the strategic planning group of Bass
PLC, a hotels, brewing, bars and restaurants conglomerate in
1999. When Bass (then known as Six Continents) announced
the demerger of its remaining businesses in 2002, Peter
joined the newly independent hotels company,
InterContinental Hotels Group, as Executive Vice President
(EVP) of Strategy. In 2003, Peter was appointed EVP Global
Brand Services with responsibility for group strategy,
worldwide marketing and distribution, loyalty programs and
revenue management.

EB: InterContinental Hotels Group is comprised of seven
major hotel chains across the world. What challenges do you
face in managing those chains? Are there any industryspecific
challenges that are particularly difficult to face?

Gowers: I think the biggest challenge for us is global
brand development. We really wrestled with the challenge of
deciding which brands to run globally and which ones are
national. As part of our organizational review, we
decided that we would run our InterContinental brand as a
global brand, meaning one team based in one location with
contacts with stakeholders in three regions. They run it as
one consistent product across the world.

Holiday Inn (the world’s most stayed-at brand) is run on a
regional basis. For Holiday Inn we have dedicated teams in
each of our big markets. Each Holiday Inn looks and feels a
bit different depending on where you are in the world.

We operate in a franchise service model. We not only have
the challenge of what you would like the brand to look like in
different regions, but we also have the added challenge of
actually making it happen. We don’t control the consumer
experience to the last degree. Most branded hotels in the
world are franchised. The owner of the property is not the
same as the brand owner.

The approach to this challenge has always been to anchor it
back to what the consumer wants. What do we think matters
to our consumers? We found that 70% of the people who are
staying in a hotel tonight are staying in the country they live
in. Knowing that, we are much better off optimizing our
brand for local market conditions than trying to impose a
‘one size fits all’ approach across the world.

EB: How do you run the InterContinental brand? How the
team is set up and structured in terms of roles and
responsibilities?

Gowers: We have a Senior VP of the InterContinental brand
and she is based in our corporate office in the UK with me.
She has all the classic brand management responsibilities:
developing the brand essence, the core brand positioning,
the essential attributes for the brand, the hotel standards,
and assuring a consistent, creative look and feel. She also
does the media buying and selection for most markets of the
world.

In the biggest region in which we operate (U.S.), we have
folks on the ground that deal with modifying the global
campaign locally and also serve as the public face of the
brand if we try to buy or sell a new hotel. Those people
report in a matrix structure into the global brand manager
and also to a local or regional marketing director.

We have a brand team here in the centre that is responsible
for A&P and new product development. In total, the team is
about six people.

EB: With regard to developing the InterContinental brand
positioning based on a universal target consumer insight,
how did you tackle this?

Gowers: First of all, on the consumer side, the
InterContinental brand targets the consumer who is
internationally-minded, psychographically as well as
demographically (who see themselves as or actually are
people who travel all over the world). We have a lot of
consumers in America who don’t travel the world at all, but
like to feel they understand its differences. The brand is
aimed at that kind of consumer.

When we revisited our brand positioning, we commissioned
quantitative research in the US market, Europe and several
markets in Asia to get an understanding of our broad
consumer base for segmentation purposes. From this
research, we distilled the critical and fundamental attributes
to deliver the guest experience that really needed to be
consistent across all three regions. For the InterContinental
brand, these attributes included: having a signature
restaurant, providing 24-hour a day services and offering real
local insight to help you get the most from your stay.

Then we looked at attributes that were very specific to the
local market. For example, a consumer who visits one of the
less developed markets in Asia Pacific expects to find many
staff to deal with their needs, they know that the labour
costs there support this level of service. They don’t
necessarily expect quite the same thing when they go to
Geneva.

So we have a basic series of things that all our hotels do
regardless of where they are in the world and we try to select
a minimum number. What we are looking to have is a
guaranteed execution across the world. In a service business
the fewer things you guarantee, the more likely you are to
be able to do them. Brands that can guarantee very
complicated propositions around the world tend only to be
higher-priced brands like the InterContinental.

We might have 25% of standards that are absolutely cast in
stone; the remainder (which are largely to do with physical
property and staffing levels) will be much more flexible by
region. We allow our hotel operators in each region to make
those decisions in accordance with local competition.

EB: How does your vision and culture relate to your brand
positioning?

Gowers: We are trying to link the corporate strategy of the
business that we communicate to the stock market as explicitly
as possible with our day-today operations. This company is
all about signing up newcontracts and franchises
and the key driver of doing that is brand strength.
Gradually over time, we built more and more
of a brand culture in our company where it used to be
dominated by a hotel operations culture. These are two very
different things. We are wrestling with the challenge: what
takes the values of your brand right through the organization
when your organization is full of people who are not used to
seeing brands in the hotel industry.

EB: How do you ensure that this brand positioning is
executed in terms of the values that people represent to the
end consumer?

Gowers: There are two big things that we have learned that
have influenced the way we do things:

You can’t come up with a positioning of your brand that is
inconsistent with the sort of people you’ve got working for
you, unless you are prepared to change them all and that is
pretty difficult. We very much start from the perspective that
if you want this value to come alive on the property, you
have to have the right kind of people in the first place. So, I
can’t tweak my brand values unless I am committed to
changing my staff.

The second thing we learned is that every aspect of your
marketing and service delivery has to be tied back to the
brand essence & personality. I know this is Marketing 101,
but in this industry it’s something quite difficult to do. Our
brand personality, ‘the hotel that understands you’, wouldn’t
mean anything if we couldn’t get those little executions right.
We tend to try and do fewer things, but do them really well.
A good example of that would be our Holiday Inn Express
brand. We selected one or two things that we can stand for
and completely execute. A new breakfast concept, an
initiative of the brand director, was successfully rolled out
over 1,000 hotels in about 3 months. This concept was
thoroughly researched and works on one of the key
attributes of Holiday Inn Express.

EB: Once you’ve got that employee base you can’t change it
completely, but you can influence the new people that you
take on board. How do the brand values influence your
recruitment process?

Gowers: At a property level it is fairly obvious that
recruiting on brand type does. You tend to screen against a
particular pattern of brand attributes. For example, at
Holiday Inn we tend to recruit people who are extrovert and
have a friendly demeanour and all the other things that go
with our brand. At InterContinental we try to recruit people
that know how to deliver discreet service. We even tried to
extend this back up the line: if you look at the 5 or 6 people
that head up the brand in the different markets, you will find
that they tend to embody their brand personality. So the
person who runs Staybridge Suites is very much a straightforward,
unpretentious kind of guy and the lady who runs
InterContinental is someone who obviously knows her way
around the luxury end of the travel market.

We have got people whose personalities reflect the brand
that they run and that turns out to be very effective. When
you are trying to sell a new hotel (or get a travel agent to
decide to book people into your property) there is nothing
that makes them feel more comfortable about it than seeing
the personality of the brand come through in the people who
are going to deliver it.

EB: Could you elaborate on the brand values that are
important for InterContinental in recruitment?

Gowers: InterContinental tends to look for people who are
respectful but not sycophantic, have a degree of appreciation
for the world, rather than just their local market.
InterContinental, for example, has a far higher proportion of
people who have worked in multiple countries, right down to
housekeepers and front desk staff. We do tend to recruit
people who know the foibles of different nationalities and that
is much more important than at a Holiday Inn Express. A
good InterContinental General Manager will probably have
worked in at least three countries and three continents. For
most of our people this is quite true, they have worked in
multiple geographic regions of the world. Ultimately, the
brand personality is very much to be both worldly and
international and relatively exclusive and sophisticated.

EB: Does this carry through in the way you evaluate people
in their performance reviews?

Gowers: We’re getting there. On the spectrum of things you
can do to guarantee the guest’s experience, you first start
with a clear brand identity. You translate that into who you
hire and you then monitor that into how they deliver. I would
say we have done a good job on the first two. We are
starting to track individual performance with reference to
individual brands. That has been the main challenge, and I
guess it’s also the case in other industries. Economies of
scale in the systems facilitate tracking them all in the same
way (standard performance assessment across brands). This
can leave little room for brand individuality. In the industry
everyone is learning that you can’t create a true brand
personality unless you do measure the brand performance
differently by brand. We are just starting to roll this out.

Principles of Effective Global Brand Leadership

In this discussion, Peter Gowers has emphasized the
importance of several principles of leading global brands.

Focus the Global Brand Team

In a service industry, having a focused brand positioning is
a key success factor. Knowing this, InterContinental
selected set of core brand attributes which then allows the
Global Brand Team to focus on, and flawlessly execute,
each of those attributes. The brand platform clearly
identifies which attributes should be consistent globally and
which can be adapted for the local market, giving clarity
between the Global Brand Team and local marketers.

Inspire Personal Commitment to the Brand

A challenge several global brand leaders face is inspiring
the personal commitment of their employees to their
brand. InterContinental recognizes this challenge and
reflects it not only in their positioning, but also in their
hiring practices. The brand leaders in each of their markets
personify the brand. In leading by example, they inspire
others in the organization to become more committed to
the brand. When hiring all new employees, InterContinental
looks for people who embody the brand personality,
knowing that they will better be able to deliver on the
brand promise.

Promote True Brand Behaviour

Promoting the right behaviour is a key component to the
long-term success of a brand. An essential part of
promoting consistent brand behaviour is measurement.
InterContinental acknowledges the importance of
monitoring how employees deliver on the brand promise.
While they are still in the process of rolling out a
performance measurement system tailored to their
individual brands, InterContinental understands the
importance of promoting and reinforcing behaviour that is
consistent with the brand identity.

http://www.effectivebrands.com