Integrated Marketing - Rosewood Hotel & Resort

Rosewood Hotel & Resort

Integrated Marketing  

CRM

Junjie Zhuge

Background

     Rosewood Hotel & Resort is one of the most luxury hotels all around the world with about thirty years history and its headquarter is located at Dallas. Rosewood has a collection of 12 boutique hotels across North America, Caribbean, Latin America, Mid East and Asia Pacific. It is a privately held hotel and famous for its ability to enhance a property’s value by creating unique, one-of-a-kind properties that differentiated from other chain-like luxury competitors and the reflection of the local character with culture architectural details.

Managerial Issue

    In early 2004, Rosewood, facing the stagnant growth, was evaluating the possibility of a corporate brand strategy to establish Rosewood to a true brand with a global reputation of iconic luxury hotel so that the hotel would have a high cross property usage and company growth.  Rosewood now is facing the problem of whether they should implement the corporate brand strategy or just keep the “old” individual brand strategy, since the individual brand strategy could result the limitation and restriction on sales performance and company development. The individual brand strategy was a really old approach that created by Rosewood management in 1990s and they thought that it would be an extremely powerful tool to differentiated rosewood properties from other competitors with corporate brands. However, after 20 years, the lack of this strategy is becoming more and more apparent and Rosewood realized that it had low recognition and brand wide usage among guest is an untapped asset. Now Rosewood has two groups of competitors: the corporate branded hotels like Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons, and the collection of individually branded hotels like Rock Resorts and Orient-Express. In order to be more competitive and increase the company’s growth, there are two ways: either to go through frequency program with individual strategy or corporate brand strategy. Rosewood management should clearly understand the pros and cons of both strategies and calculate the customer lifetime value from the investment that both strategies could bring to the company. Moreover, Rosewood management should also evaluate whether the corporate brand strategy could increase customer’s royalty, and to see whether the new strategy could bring more market share and whether the increasing of revenue could cover the cost of increasing in marketing promotion and operation.

Strategy Direction

     Individual brand strategy is to give every hotel a unique brand name, which means each hotel could have its own brand image and character. In other words, this strategy will satisfy most customers’ need even they have different level of requirements. Each hotel could target on its own market with different location, culture and architectural details so that to make a “sense of place”. This strategy could help each hotel easily clear its position by allowing them promotion differently so that to distinguish each hotel. In comparison of the corporate brand strategy, individual brand strategy allows each hotel focus on itself instead of focusing on Rosewood Company. This would give each of those 12 hotels different identities and they will have their own trademark. They look the same and all under Rosewood but they are totally different with each other so that this could provide Rosewood to develop an intangible value and reputation to collect more customers from different level.