Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, an ultra-luxury hospitality brand, hired Spherical Communications in 2016 to increase awareness of the brand among luxury consumers on social media.
While the brand's individual hotels are well known by their own select fan base, Rosewood wished to actively increase the awareness of sister hotels within the collection. For example, followers of The Carlyle, in New York, often did not know or recognize that Las Ventanas al Paraiso, in Mexico, was also a Rosewood hotel.
Spherical's objective has been to establish a brand image for Rosewood that highlights the uniqueness of each hotel, while also illustrating the brand's trademark philosophy ('A Sense of Place') as a common denominator of all Rosewood hotels. The objective was, and is, to inspire current and potential guests of one Rosewood hotel to seek unique experiences across the entire Rosewood collection.
We leveraged user-generated content to tell a more authentic story than brand-owned hotel assets could. A recent study by Olapic, posted on Adweek on January 2, found that social media users across the age spectrum trust user-generated photos more than content created by brands, which only furthers the necessity of using UGC. Every month, our strategy is to find enough photos from each destination that have a consistent visual identity, and that are luxurious enough to raise brand identity for Rosewood.
Rather than jumble destinations together, we devote a given day on Instagram to one hotel. Posting three times over the course of the day, we share the hotel's uniqueness while also introducing the follower to the destination that surrounds it. We curate photos and videos from each day to match not only in subject matter, but in color schemes and general aesthetic as well. That way, when users discover the Rosewood Hotels & Resorts Instagram feed, they immediately see clear bands that delineate different destinations that tell a unique story.
One story, for example, highlights a colorful, personality-filled day in San Miguel de Allende. It begins with a photo of a guest on their balcony, before moving on to a game of tennis, and finally to afternoon drinks. Another showcases New York in the fall. Using all UGC, we showcase a guest in their suite, the breakfast offering at the hotel, and foliage of Central Park. In other instances, we use UGC to supplement owned assets. To announce a new Rosewood hotel being built in Hong Kong, we paired a hotel rendering with two UGC photos that showed a sample day in the life of a traveler in Hong Kong. By curating UGC photos that matched the color scheme of the rendering, we created a clear, linear story when shown as a group of three images.
When posting UGC, we tag each photo with #ASenseof___ (destination), for example, #ASenseofNewYork. This creates a growing, curated feed for each destination that allows users to see what photos Rosewood has posted of a given place. We also encourage users to share their own stories with the brand-wide #RWJourneys hashtag. Our captions often mention this, amplifying our sources for UGC each month.
Robust community management engages with users and fans, encouraging them to continue posting with the #RWJourneys hashtag when they're in Rosewood destinations, providing for a constantly updated feed of potential UGC images to curate throughout the year.
Spherical took over the global Rosewood brand Instagram account in June 2016. From June-December 2016, when compared to the previous period, we:
- Grew the Instagram audience 68% to more than 30,000 followers
- Added 12,133 followers (a 53% increase)
- Increased engagement by 156%
- Increased volume of posts published by 79%
- Increased number of likes by 158%
- Increased number of comments by 90%
