Brand update: W Hotels Worldwide

It’s been a busy few months for the W Hotels brand: the W Dubai — Al Habtoor City opened to the public on June 20, 2016, and just three months before that, W Hotels revealed its renewed brand positioning, and approach to guest experience.

W Hotels Worldwide global brand leader Anthony Ingham was in the region to reveal more at the Global Brand Summit during Starwood Hotels & Resorts’ Europe, Africa and Middle East (EAME) leadership conference in Doha in March.

When we meet him at the new Al Habtoor City complex in Dubai, Ingham is relaxed despite jet-lag after a flight from New York, and tells Hotelier about its new position: “We have identified an evolved target consumer, an evolved positioning for the brand, new core values that underpin the way that the brand is delivered, and some additional passion points. Our traditional passion points are fashion, design and music, and we are going to expand that with an additional one that will encompass other aspects of what consumers are really after today.”

Ingham continues: “The fourth passion is called ‘Fuel’; Fuel is the energy to look good, feel good, go longer, stay later. It’s W’s perspective on exercise, living well, and healthy eating.”

Discussing how this would reflect in W’s offering, Ingham says it’s about breakfast ingredients that can power people through the day, bar snacks that are not fattening, and low calorie cocktails.

He stresses that while the regular options will always be available, the move with ‘Fuel’ is to give consumers the power of choice.

Further to this, the brand has evolved its target consumer to reflect the trends seen in the last four to five years.

“There are some fundamental shifts in the way that consumers are behaving, so [we will have] much more importance on exercising and healthy living, and much more importance on having a point of view on sustainability and social causes,” explains Ingham.

The approach to food and beverage from younger consumers is very quality-driven, adds Ingham, and says it’s much more about the quality of the experience and the food, and “not about the fanciness”.

This new brand positioning and target market has been made effective immediately, reports Ingham.

He’s keen to stress that this is not a completely new direction that has been launched out of the blue. “What happens by nature, particularly with a brand like W, is that every hotel is different to the previous one. Our goal is to have a constant DNA that flows through the brand which is inspired by our roots in New York.” Ingham says that some of the elements in the repositioning are what the teams across W have already been experimenting with as they open new hotels.

And W Dubai — Al Habtoor City is probably a great example of the evolution of the brand. he notes.

Praising general manager Peter Katusak-Huzsvar, Ingham says: “There’s nothing quite like it in Dubai yet, so we are super excited. If you think about W’s DNA and what W stands for, and being at the forefront of design, what’s new and next in fashion and music, the fun-filled energetic cocktail culture-driven scene… Dubai is kind of the Manhattan of the Middle East, and that fits so well for W which is a Manhattan-born brand.”

He’s equally full of praise for the W Doha, which has been open since early 2009. “W Doha completely redefined hospitality in Qatar, and broke everybody’s expectations of what you could do. The W Doha manages to be forward-thinking and avant-garde in its approach and yet is a genuine mix of all of the locals and expats and tourists in a way that is W-energetic but fully respectful of the local culture,” notes Ingham.

Beyond these two W properties, there’s a lot more coming for the region. One more Dubai property will join the fold, along with a hotel in Jordan, Oman and Abu Dhabi. Egypt and Morocco will also see the additions of W hotels over the next few years.

However, it’s not just opening hotels that keeps Ingham busy. Alongside these are initiatives that very much cater to the brand’s target market. What She Said, for example, is a global speaker series that features inspiring women from the worlds of fashion, music, tech, media and more. After launching in March 2016 at the W Austin during SXSW, it moved to W London — Leicester Square in April 2016 with designer and philanthropist Diane von Furstenberg in conversation with London-based designer Mary Katrantzou.

Ingham reveals: “I’m very keen to do What She Said here. It’s a new platform for us to allow very influential thought-leading women — generally from the worlds of fashion, design and music, aligned with the passions of the brand — to share their experience of being a successful woman in today’s world. Our plan is to have What She Said programming in different parts of the world — and I think it’s very relevant in the Middle East.”

Partnering with leaders in their field, Ingham says, has always been a focus for the brand. “W doesn’t really do traditional marketing. All of our marketing is based around collaborating with thought leaders to create experiences that our guests really engage with and love, and then we create digital content around those experiences so that our broader audience can see what we’re doing.”

Speaking of digital media, Ingham also highlights social media platforms such as Snapchat which the brand used successfully at the end of 2015. The brand activated a geo-filter campaign which mimicked traditional postcards including phrases such as “You Wish You Were Here” and rolled it out to Snapchat users who were at participating W Hotels while using the social media platform.

He says: “We were the first travel brand in the world to launch a Snapchat campaign in the whole travel category and the first one to launch Snapchat geofilters. Snapchat said it was their most successful paid geo-filter ever across all categories — and it hit seven million people.”

Is this a reflection of the millennial mind-set and travellers, who, many reports say, are the ones hotels need to target? Ingham responds: “It is on our mind [but] we try not to be overly influenced by millennials. We look at it from the sense that W charts its own path and always has done. There are some macro trends in the way consumers think that are flowing from generation to generation… it doesn’t actually happen that there is a cut-off date from millennial to Gen X or millennial to Z.

“The beauty of W is that because each hotel is the next step in the brand, we are always evolving our marketing and our approach to positioning, so we never get to the point where we build something for a specific age group.”

He reveals that W has the highest proportion of the 25- to 35-year-old bracket of any Starwood brand. “So within all big, particularly luxury, hospitality brands, W has quite a young leaning — which is sometimes surprising because W is an expensive brand, from a price point of view.”

Ingham continues: “W sits alongside luxury not confined by it — because if you say W is a luxury brand it immediately brings up connotations of white gloves and silver, but we boldly colour outside the lines of luxury. We look at millennials as a source of inspiration for how consumers are thinking differently. But W’s consumer base can be anywhere from 25-55 — there’s definitely a young mind-set in our target audience. Whether they are actually a millennial or whether it’s someone who is approaching 50 and thinks like a millennial… that is where we play.”

Upcoming W Hotels in the region:

• W Amman Hotel: Opening March 2017
• W Dubai – The Palm: Opening March 2017
• W Abu Dhabi: Opening January 2018
• W Muscat: Opening January 2019
• W Marrakech: Opening June 2019
• W Sharm El Sheikh: Opening July 2020
* Data sourced from StarwoodHotels.com as of July 21

Bio: Anthony Ingham

Anthony Ingham is global brand leader for W Hotels Worldwide. Under Ingham’s guidance, W is on track to reach 60 hotels by 2018. Prior to this, he served as vice president, North America brand management for W Hotels, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, The Luxury Collection and Le Méridien, where he oversaw the strategic direction of over 60 hotels and resorts. Prior to his move to New York to take on that role in 2013, Ingham oversaw the strategic and creative direction, guest experience, and overall performance of St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, W Hotels and Le Méridien in Starwood’s Europe, Africa and Middle East (EAME) division. Ingham joined Starwood in 2010 following tenure at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), where he held a variety of sales, marketing and guest experience positions in the company’s global corporate offices in the UK, Australia and Asia.