Instagram has become a primary destination for discovering travel inspiration, trends, and cultural moments—requiring brands to show up with content that feels timely, native to the platform, and community-driven. As a legacy luxury brand, JW Marriott faced the challenge of maintaining its elevated aesthetic and global reputation while clearly differentiating its point of view on wellness within an increasingly crowded luxury landscape.
This meant evolving our Instagram presence from overly polished, static visuals to trend-informed formats—leveraging creators for authenticity and employing storytelling that brings to life our distinctive hotels, dynamic interpretations of wellness, and holistic guest proof points.
Objectives:
To revitalize JW Marriott’s Instagram presence, we evolved the channel from an expected expression of luxury into a culturally fluent, platform-native experience that reflects how today’s travelers discover and engage with modern hospitality. Our strategy centered on balancing trend-informed creativity with the brand’s elevated reputation, ensuring relevance without sacrificing refinement—doing so largely through repurposed assets to keep investment low.
We evolved the channel by implementing three strategies:
The result is an Instagram presence that feels modern, engaging, and deeply rooted in JW Marriott’s core values, demonstrating that heritage luxury has a space on today’s most dynamic social platform. Our revamped strategy also showcases wellness through an authentic, holistic lens—one designed to evolve with changing cultural trends and audience expectations.
Our evolution of JW Marriott’s Instagram presence delivered measurable growth across reach, engagement and revenue — proving that heritage brands can thrive by showing up meaningfully across digital and social channels.
In 2025 we garnered 77.2M total impressions, an increase of 8.2% YoY, demonstrating the effectiveness of our culturally relevant, social-native posts, which proved to capture viewer attention. We also garnered 13.2K total shares, an increase of 42.7% YoY. This lift in engagement further validated the impact of our approach, as timely trends, playful storytelling, and influencer partnerships sparked greater connection and real-time participation with our content.
Our Instagram strategy also translated into business impact as attributable revenue increased by 39.8% YoY, totaling $3.8M for the year, reflecting how our content moved audiences from passive enthusiasm to active consideration, conversion, and bookings.
By leveraging cultural trends, humanizing our brand voice and partnering with influencers, we connected with our Instagram audience in a more meaningful way, with positive results across JW Marriott’s most valuable metrics—impressions, attributable revenue, and shares—indicating our storytelling strategy is resonating with our current and growing community of mindful travelers.
