Dorchester Collection is a collection of 10 iconic hotels, in iconic locations. Audiences are familiar with some hotels, not all. Insights from Gallup highlighted that guest engagement rises if an exceptional dining experience has been enjoyed at the hotels. Dorchester Collection developed the idea of bringing the hotels together by creating "A Taste of Dorchester Collection".
This room service menu presents one classic dish from each hotel. Guests at any Dorchester Collection hotel can enjoy these dishes such as The Beverly Hills Hotel's "McCarthy Salad" while at The Dorchester, London.
Objective:
Launch and promote the room service menu by harnessing the core audience to drive sales
Awareness of Dorchester Collection hotels
Develop the worldwide social media community, by coordinating activity via brand hashtag #DCmoments
Strategy:
All brand and hotels' social media profiles were utilised. The campaign was teased in August, launched in September, ran until end November. Activity was tracked using the brand hashtag, stimulating conversations with #newmenu, #roomservice, #inroomdining.
Shareable social media content was produced, starting with teaser posts; on launch, the reveal was coordinated to lift the cloche on the #newmenu. The crescendo built to become an international conversation between properties, fans, guests, influencers, press.
Outcome:
During the campaign Instagram posts mentioning #DCmoments saw 384K Likes
Average weekly volume of hashtag mentions increased by 248%.
Twitter activity for brand hashtag saw nearly 22M potential impressions, a weekly average of 1.5M impressions from 3.3k total mentions, peaking in final week with 350 RTs.
User generated content was repurposed
This social media campaign deployed both brand and individual hotels' accounts to harness the global nature of the business as a strength. Grassroots support was planted in front of the powerful core audience of every hotel and the brand, starting a ripple effect of social media buzz, which extended across other media.
The Dorchester Collection communications teams worked across time zones, in different languages, running the campaign activities alongside the individual hotel teams. A custom designed landing page on the Dorchester Collection website, an email marketing campaign sent to the guest database and traditional press activity, all featured in the promotional mix. Wolfgang Puck (Executive Chef at Hotel Bel-Air and 45 Park Lane) joined in with tastings; press and blogger outreach activity took place at The Dorchester, London; Le Richemond, Geneva and Hotel Principe di Savoia, Milan in signature suites. Most notable of these was a pyjama party at The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills where guests were presented with the iconic hotel pyjamas for that total room service experience.
Dishes from this new menu accounted for 15% of room service revenue in Q4 of 2014, the most popular being Hotel Bel-Air's Garden Vegetable soup which sold 1119 times in the first 3 months.
The structure of the campaign allowed each hotel to tell the whole story featuring in turn each dish on the menu (while also highlighting their own signature dish) thus providing relevance for their own local, loyal audience. Conversations after the launch and sharing of user generated content, became part of regular engagement across all hotel social media profiles.
It should be noted that Dorchester Collection corporate communications team devised and implemented the campaign with in-house teams – there were no digital agencies appointed to post and community-manage. Creative elements were crafted and produced in-house.
This first global social media campaign was coordinated by Dorchester Collection and now forms the template for future activity, providing key learnings and a positive affirmation of the commitment to and value enjoyed from the brand and hotels' social media communities.
