When I meet Viceroy Hotel Group CEO Bill Walshe, the first thing he does is wave the new Viceroy ‘brand book’ under my nose. Sat under the bright lights of the Dubai World Trade Centre at Arabian Travel Market, it is rather a relief to be shown not another corporate brochure but a glossy A3 magazine, with fashion-inspired imagery and minimal words used to showcase its 16 hotels.
At the end, a double page spread is dedicated to the 17th hotel, Viceroy Dubai Palm Jumeirah, set to open in 2016 and described as a “palatial recreation of Arabian style that presents an ensemble of enchantment”. There are no lists of facilities or services on the pages of the magazine, no persuasive language and no lengthy reservation contact details; rather a few choice bullet points and photos of each hotel, their surroundings and the trendy, beautiful guests that seem to accommodate them.
The impact is one of intrigue, and makes the reader want to pack their bags and jet off to destinations such as St. Lucia, Miami or Hollywood.
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“It’s a new communication style for the brand,” says Walshe of the magazine, the first issue of which launched in May, with a second now in the works. “It’s our version of a corporate directory, unlike anyone else’s, featuring one of the world’s foremost fashion bloggers on the cover.”
Here, my fashion knowledge lets me down, but Walshe explains the blogger is Alexandra Spencer, who grew up in Dubai — where Walshe himself worked as chief marketing officer for Jumeirah Group — and is his best friend’s daughter.
For the relaunch of Sugar Beach, a Viceroy Resort in St. Lucia, he recalls: “I was about to send our usual photographer over to get the usual pictures and I called Alex — she’s massive in blogging and she has half a million followers on Instagram and a couple of million hits on her blog. [I said] ‘here’s the deal, I’ll send you and a couple of a friends to St. Lucia for a week with a camera. No editorial guidelines, and I want 50 photos in return’ and they just shot each other and she blogged it and we ended up with something that should probably be a Vogue Italia shoot, not a hotel shoot. And we had such fun. What the brand is trying to do is maintain that relevance to an emerging audience.
“And we have, as suited hoteliers I think, no idea how to speak to the fashion blogging generation, the emerging Gen Y customer, so I’ve actually started to collude as opposed to collaborate with Alex to be the voice to the social media generation and to help us articulate what we do in a way that’s relevant to others; and actually it has made us far more courageous. I would never have put an image like this on the front of a hotel brochure,” Walshe says, referring to the casual young blonde woman sat on the deck of a yacht in shorts and a top that shows off her shoulders.
“She would have been covered from head to toe, but the reaction we’ve had this week from people is that it’s coffee table, it’s lifestyle, it’s emotional, it’s connected, so we’re having a lot of fun.” He reveals that he is now working with Spencer on setting up a Viceroy blog and hints more is to come in the social sphere, in which Walshe himself is active on both Twitter and Instagram.
“What we’re trying to do as a company is speak more to the destination opportunities and the destination feel and experience.
“Clearly, we want to say we have bathrooms and we have bedrooms but that is not the key message; the hero message is [for example] ‘be yourself in New York, it’s a Downtown vibe in an Uptown location’. You can see [from the brand book] that if there was a Mad Men inspired cruise liner in the 1960s it would be Viceroy New York, it’s got that whole kind of cabin, wooden, grown up feel to it.”
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