In Unofficial Partner podcast #314, Stuart talked extensively about Accor’s application of sponsorship across the marketing funnel and Paris 2024. This abridged version of the interview focuses on the core business use of sponsorship by Accor. As usual, this edit has been edited for ease of reading.
Stuart Wareman, SVP of Sponsorship, Events and Experiences for Accor, the French multinational hotel group that owns, manages and franchises hotels in over 5300 locations in 110 countries and is the biggest hospitality company in Europe, the sixth biggest in the world.
Its booking platform brand Accor Live Limitless (ALL) has become a familiar presence in sport. The brand’s sport sponsorship portfolio includes the shirt of PSG and official partnerships with Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, The 2023 Rugby World Cup and many other major national relationships.
‘Fundamentally, Accor is a collection of some 36 individual hotel brands. Most major hotel chains are portfolios of hotel brands with the power of global distribution. And growing a member base through their loyalty programmes means that those customers are more likely to stay in a selection or multiple of those different hotel brands. It’s a model that has increasingly become asset light. Traditionally, the hotel companies used to own the real estate and run and operate all of the hotels. That’s now not really the case – an asset light model means that either you have a hotel owner that pays us to manage the hotel, which means that all the staff are Accor staff; or more typically now it’s moved to a franchise model where the owner physically operates the hotel and licences the brand, licences those type of things, taps into our distribution network, taps into our loyalty and member base, and all of our global deals, whether it’s through procurement and all those kinds of things. So it’s offering those economies of scale to those hotel owners.
Accor is our corporate brand, so it’s very much a B2B brand and that’s what we talk to our employees and our hotel owners with.
The consumer brand we tend to go to market with is ALL, Accor Live Limitless, which is our booking platform all.accor.com, the digital gateway to all of our kind of ecosystem, and booking system – but it’s also a loyalty programme. So ALL is a kind of all encompassing consumer facing brand. And then underneath that you have the individual hotel brands whether it’s Fairmont, Sofitel, Raffles Mövenpick, Mercure, Novotel, Ibis, etc.
Accor traditionally has used sponsorship in the past, but much more singularly focused on France, because France has been our heartland and the birthplace of a company. But as we’ve grown internationally, but also bought a number of luxury lifestyle brands, whether it’s Fairmont or Ennismoor portfolio, we clearly came together as a much broader portfolio, and the rebrand of Le Club Accor Hotels which was the original loyalty programme, into ALL, it needed something to kind of take it to market globally.
And PSG, the PSG shirt was chosen in 2019 to be that vehicle and it did phenomenally well. The research told us that within 18 months it had driven two thirds of all global brand awareness for ALL which is pretty remarkable. But what we found was obviously people had seen the brand and they could recognise it but didn’t have a clue what we did.
So our job is now starting to evolve to be able to educate, and not just continue to drive brand awareness but drive deeper brand understanding. We’re a hotel booking platform, we’re a hotel loyalty programme and we’re made up of multiple hotel brands.
I think what we’ve been able to be able to do is galvanise sponsorship behind a portfolio and have it portfolio-led rather than individually brand-led and that’s been an important change so that we can actually communicate our key global objectives. We promote ALL.com as the main sponsorship brand.
So if you think about the full funnel approach, sponsorship feeds into the funnel at every single stage.
At the very top of the funnel, top of mind brand awareness and understanding, what is ALL. That’s the booking platform and a hotel launch programme. So ideally we want people to have been exposed to our sponsorship activity and when they’re in the market for booking a hotel, did that nudge some users slightly further down the funnel to consider us and use us?
Further down the funnel, it’s about bringing to life the member benefits and ideally working with our rightsholders to incorporate member benefits into the sponsorship itself. So can we integrate member pricing? Our members get a discount on PSG merchandise for example, and that reflects our member rates on our website. If you’re a member, you get a cheaper hotel room if you book direct on ALL.com. Another aspect could be room upgrades. So therefore we do seat upgrades in stadia to reflect that kind of benefit – these are just bringing those things to life which means that when our guests are in our hotels they’re that much more likely to sign up to our loyalty programme, right?
Because it’s all about trying to get them into the ecosystem. And further down once they are a member they’re earning points on their stays. What do we want to offer them for those points or what options do we want to give them? So we’ve created limitless experiences which offer the opportunity for our members to burn their points on these amazing money can’t buy experiences or access tickets or events that are otherwise sold out.
And we know that those members stay more, spend more and love us more than any other member group or customer segments. So this is the most important, valuable customer segment and it proves very, very valuable to us.
And then the final piece is how do we use our sponsorships as business growth platform. Not just direct business that the partner can give our hotels right which is a good credibility piece, but also we use hospitality to engage our hotel owners. How are we engaging with customers? How are we unlocking new business opportunities for our core businesses, hotels, but also our ancillary businesses which we have many that are complementary to the hospitality business.
So our CEO is incredibly passionate about sponsorship, he’s seen it work very well. He’s seen the benefits, not just from a marketing perspective, but also those business connections, right. I mean, being a partner of Paris in Olympic and Paralympic Games, gives him gives us very high seat at the table. And he’s been asked by the Organising Committee to support and to work with government to help other corporate investment and another Olympic and Paralympic prerogative. So it kind of elevates it to a different level, that type of thing and the Americas Cup piece provides economic benefits to France as well. So it gives them gives us different seats at different tables. And therefore each one has its own different balance, I’d say in terms of business case, and it’s my job to put together the second the marketing side what I feel we can get from an ROI perspective across our three pillars. So you know, what’s it what’s it delivering on a marketing level? What’s it delivering to energise our loyalty base, and drive more loyalty members around the world and get them to engage more and what other business opportunities are there? So for example, is there an opportunity for our catering company to do hospitality Catering is there an opportunity for our online accommodation management solution ,,,,,,,,,, events to be able to get involved in certain things? So those kinds of things get put alongside that and they get put to get into the board?
So I was before my time, but my understanding is that we were announcing ALL, we are creating ALL as a new brand, a totally new brand. And there was a big sponsorhip audit around what the available properties could be to help launch that. So it was seen as a good vehicle to launch on a global basis, just because it’s not to the point where the right property could get that global reach. So a number of properties were assessed. Our CEO actually used to be president of PSG. So there was also a connection there. So he had seen the power in the direction that the club was taken as well. So that really helped because he could then understand the direction of the club and the potential power and seen what other sponsors have done with it. So that that really helped there and the figures bore it out … you know two thirds of the global brand awareness is being driven by that front of shirt. You know, when Messi joined, it just exploded. And throughout COVID It gave us continued continued us being there and to give us continued relevance within the marketplace when all of our other competitors were having to scale back.
Sustainability and ESG genuinely are so important to us. We are very fortunate, we have our chief sustainability officer who is on the executive board, and she’s Macron’s former environmental minister, so a real power hitter so it’s across all verticals, whether it’s environmental concerns, whether it’s from a sustainability standpoint, DNI and everything kind of in between so massive corporate targets and huge efforts to make changes and make sure we continue to get better. In those in that direction. And Paris 2024 with global with the event itself, it’s wanting to be carbon neutral, right. So working towards that and and making sure that athlete, activism from a positive sense, can be embraced because athletes are more and more speaking out. They want to work with companies who share their beliefs and do they can see themselves in so Hakeem who’s blind footballer in the French team. He is he’s working at the problem in Pullman Tour Eiffel as a receptionist being trained up and he’s, he finds trying to welcome everyone from different areas. So not just from a customer standpoint or from employees standpoint, we want to make sure that everyone feels welcome.
So we’ve got a number of assets that well going to come to the natural end in the next few years or so. And it’s something we’re starting to look at which is what does our global strategy look like. You know, we are a slightly different company now than we were five, six years ago, much more global, much bigger, a lot more beefed up in the luxury lifestyle space. So the needs are slightly different and we need to be more international in our outlook. And how are we supporting the global growth of the business? Because it’s not just from a consumer lens, we need to look at we need to look at where the next hotel developments going to be coming from and how can we support our development team to be able to convince owners investors to choose us over our competitors when they’re putting a flag on their hotel.
To some extent yes, I mean, we are going through a bit of a restructure so we’re creating for example, creating a European sponsorship team. This will be based in Paris, they’re going to be looking after the European centric, focused sponsorships. So this is all in train at the moment. And each of the four hubs will have sponsorship experts, that on a global level, we will support and will be able to coordinate so we’ll have our kind of overseeing the global platforms, but helping them to localise them and to bring those to life in their market, but also help them fill the gaps geographically that the past global platforms don’t address. Whether it’s customer segment or whether that’s territory. But in terms of the different matrix organisation, yeah, something that I find really fascinating such a such an interesting challenge, because it’s all facets of the marketing mix it’s B2B and B2C, it’s loyalty is B2E. It’s just everything that you could possibly think of from the marketing mix side is incorporated within what we do. So, it’s endlessly fascinating. There’s never a dull moment.
The trends are looking amazing, actually, I have to say the industry itself was a little bit cautious, particularly going into high interest rates, two recessions, etc, etc, would business travel come back, etc. The industry has been very, very robust and we’re seeing signs of China coming back to travel now, this year, so that’s going to help boost us again. Last year, we got up to 2019 ref par level. So the major metric in the note administrators ref par, which is revenue per available room, just how well you’re monetizing the limited inventory that you have. We’re back we were back up to 2019 levels and exceeding 2020 others by the end of the last year. We are again seeing q1, q2 is looking very, very strong as well. So we’ve seen sort of double digit rises, which is quite extraordinary. And our loyalty metrics are going through the roof as well. So we’re on a good trajectory, which is a good position to be in to be able to then kicker on an evening, you know, we’re we’re still below 2019 occupancy levels. So we still got room for further growth in our you know, occupancy figures.
I think there’s a couple of different things primarily it’s much more about brand equity, and driving longer term brand value through making sure that we’ve got that emotional strategy that connects with consumers who think better of us, perceive as more premium and therefore have a less of a price sensitivity to what we can charge so the hotels can charge more and therefore drive more profitable business.
So we’re becoming a much more kind of brand centric organisation to make sure we got very strong brands to be able to help that price elasticity to drive overall profit. Where the direct response comes in from a sponsorship standpoint is much more on some certain campaigns. So if we’ve got a summer campaign, broadly speaking, so let’s make it up, 20% off if you’re an ALL member and you’ve said some things, how are we using the sponsorship platforms and assets to create support and complement that campaign so we can do that we can drive traffic to ALL.com and do all that sort of stuff. But the majority of the benefit is seen on a longer term. basis.
Now what we do is a brand tracker every year where we can actually filter the audience by who’s aware of these individual sponsored properties. So are you aware of PSG for example. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re aware that we sponsor PSG or even that you’ve necessarily been exposed to our communications around PSG, but you are, you’re much more likely to have been exposed versus someone who’s not aware of PSG. So we can see the difference in brand awareness brand perception to be understood as more how many brands do they think are part of the portfolio etc. And we see a significant difference, uplift for that consistently across the board. So we can demonstrate that that value back on our longer term brand trackers.
