AFFINIA HOTELs
Affinia Hotels’ Art Program featuring Humza
Innovative Art Programming / Experiential Art Installations at the Shelburne and Gardens, concepted and executed as a digestibly approachable yet intrinsic facet of the Affinia guest experience.
Affinia Hotels’ Art Program featuring Rubin415
VIPaws Pet Program at Affinia Hotels
According to Affinia’s Market Metrix scores, pets are important to hotel guests. Although a limited percentage of guests actually travel with their pets, they do view hotels that welcome animals to be more welcoming and friendly.
With this, I worked with Affinia to brand and launch a distinct pet program, creating content and aligning with key like-minded brands to support this initiative.
Affinia Website
Maintaining Affinia's overall site architecture, my team and I reskinned the Affinia website with the objective being to reinforce Affinia's experiential tag line; Love the Room. Live the City, which we concepted from consumer insight. At the same time we sought tointegrate the brand's strong social media presence into the site to make a greater impression.
As part of the ongoing effort to continually appeal to families, my team and I proposed the creation of Affinia Junior, our version of a Kids’ Program. As an amenity based program, this ‘Kid Friendly. Parent Approved.’ activation included an Affinia branded backpack filled with educational yet New York City centric goodies, including branded and seasonally relevant coloring sheets, markers, healthy snacks and beverages.
BACKGROUND
Outside of the Affinia brand name, the collection of properties that fall under this brand are all unique - without consistency, causing a level of consumer confusion and financial challenges; six completely different hotels in two U.S cities.
MY ROLE
I sought to create a cohesive marketing idea, that would be understandable to consumers, the larger corporate sales environment, and potential stakeholders/investors in new properties. To accomplish this,
1. I recommended a repositioning from an umbrella perspective, rebranding Affinia Hotels as the Affinia Hotel Collection, embracing an endorsement model instead of a master brand model.
2. I worked with each individual property, embracing their unique personalities, boutique centric lifestyle hotels that leveraged the neighborhood where each hotel resides, thereby easily establishing one of a kind experiences that translated into consumers 'living like locals'.
3. Lastly, I spearheaded the development of Affinia's conversational and friendly brand voice, infusing a playful and upbeat sensibility holistically, which translated to the property level - the most important level from a customer perspective.
RESULTS
The success of this program has been unprecedented, with year over year (significant) improvement in the properties Market Metrix scores, improved customer feedback via user generated content platforms, and a steady increase in ADR - frequently leading vs trailing the comp set.
