We want to serve customers for every travel budget: Mark Weinstein, Hilton – ET BrandEquity

Hilton has ramped up its focus on the Indian market and signed Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone as its brand ambassador earlier this year. The brand will be adding multiple real estate properties to its portfolio in India this year and will launch a campaign to drive more salience and brand equity. At present, Hilton has several brands in the Indian market, including Conrad Hotels & Resorts, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, DoubleTree by Hilton, Hilton Garden Inn, and Hampton by Hilton, and has plans to introduce Waldorf Astoria and Curio to the market. While committed to generating demand and creating a formidable presence in the Indian hospitality market, Hilton is also taking large strides globally to enhance its tech capabilities to better engage with its customers and create a more seamless journey and experience.

ETBrandEquity caught up with Mark Weinstein, Chief Marketing Officer of Hilton, to deep-dive into the global marketing strategy of the brand, its positioning in the Indian market, and content creation tailored to Indian audiences.

Edited Excerpts:

Q: What is the global marketing strategy for Hilton?

Mark: We are not in the tourism, travel, lodging, or accommodation business. We are in the hospitality business, and our job is to create the light and warmth of hospitality for people who come to us. This core philosophy, laid by our founder 100 years ago, is also the center of our global marketing strategy.

Our competition is not other hotel companies but the complacency and indifference of customers. Our objective is to be relevant enough to customers so that they advocate for our experiences. The three pillars of our marketing strategy include creating relevant content, telling stories in an experiential format, and engaging with customers on social platforms.

For Hilton, social media serves as a primary platform for customer engagement, as customers across all categories use these platforms to discover and consume relevant content. We tap into their passion points and spend a lot of time creating content that keeps Hilton culturally and socially relevant.

On the experiential side, Hilton has been a long-standing partner to the McLaren F1 Team that travels extensively for races. We create a home away from home for them and bring that experience to life for the team and the fans. We have also developed similar experiences for several global celebrities, such as Deepika Padukone, Paris Hilton, and others, which have significant cultural relevance across different markets

Q: As content plays an important role in your marketing strategy, what is your overall content creation and marketing strategy?

Mark: Customers are willing to pay a premium for great products but need to know what they’re paying for. We have over 7,500 properties worldwide and strongly focus on structuring and attributing our content hotel-wise. At Hilton, we believe in being the best factual source of our hotel’s information. We use a lot of text and rich content to describe the attributes of our hotels and ensure that all of it is discoverable across social platforms and on our website so that customers can find what they are searching for.

User-generated content (UGC) is another key area for us, as there is nothing more authentic than our customers telling our story for us. We create experiences for them so that they can tell their stories and ensure they are discoverable and amplified with the support and love of our influencers like Deepika Padukone, Paris Hilton, and others.

Lastly, we also produce long- and short-form content for social media to inspire our customers and help them explore the facts they need to know about our hotels, which helps us command a premium. For example, ‘Off the Menu’ is a content series that showcases the culture, city, cuisines, hotels, and chef from the lens of Hilton’s story. It is a meaningful and authentic way to tell our story to the world, engage with our customers, and inspire people on why they should travel.

Q: Hilton has over 7,500 properties and is present across the globe. How do you ensure a common messaging across markets?

Mark: It starts with a clear understanding of our identity and purpose. When brands start telling stories that aren’t credible to them, they get in trouble. We endeavor to keep our messaging consistent worldwide. It’s about the story of Hilton’s hospitality, great stays, and our ability to do that through great design, product, and use of technology. We may use a different channel, talk about a different brand of Hilton, or work with a different creator or influencer in a specific market, but the core of it connects back to the common narrative. So, whether it is a 30-second TVC or a billboard, the communication is clear on what Hilton or any of its brands is offering to the consumer. We have centralized teams that tell our narrative globally. They simultaneously work with local teams to regionalize the message to ensure that it resonates with their customers.

Q: Interesting. All Hilton products have a distinctive positioning, so how do you ensure that they do not cannibalize each other?

Mark: Our research and insights suggest that the majority of our customers don’t just pick one brand; they stay in a particular brand depending on the travel occasion. For example, they might prefer and love Conrad, but when they go to a Tier 3 or Tier 4 market, they opt for Hilton Garden Inn or Hampton. We need to understand the commonalities and differences across each of our brands.

For example, a Hampton might not have a rooftop bar, but a Conrad would. We have launched LivSmart for people who demand long stays while the Graduate is closer to universities and colleges. Our new brand, Canopy, is a lifestyle brand.

We spend a lot of time studying customers’ needs. We focus on the gaps in the market because we want to serve every customer for every travel budget, which means more locations and more occasions being served. Further, as occasions get into different territories, we launch a new brand to cater to them.

All our brands have a clearly defined positioning, customer base, brand messaging, and attributes, powered by Hilton.

Q: So, what role do cultural nuances play when you are creating narratives for regional markets?

Mark: Today, brands must be incredibly global and local at the same time. Our regional narratives are created in two parts. Firstly, how we showcase the content in a particular market, making it authentic. Secondly, we focus on creating relevant products for markets.

For example, weddings are a big theme in the Indian market, and we use it as a lens to tell the same story that we are telling the world but in a manner that is more relevant to the audiences in India. Our Wedding Diaries program showcases Hilton’s wedding capabilities, which are authentic to who we are but also meet the requirements of the Indian market. So, it brings both aspects of the content and product together with a local flavour.

Q: How do you see the Indian market?

Mark: The US is the largest market by volume. However, there is a massive opportunity in India, and we foresee it becoming our second-largest lodging market soon. While there are 5.7 million branded hotel rooms for 341 million people in the US, India has 1.7 million rooms for 1.4 billion people.

We are stepping up investments in India and have a multi-year roadmap for the market. We will have another 75 hotels in India by 2026. Our commitment is to ensure that the demand we’re generating is not just for tomorrow but is building brand equity, memory structures, and saliency. Currently, we have five Hilton brands in the Indian market, and we see it growing to seven in the foreseeable future.

On the media side, you will see a lot more effort on OOH and social media content. We have a major performance engine that’s always running to optimize efficiency and convert demand. We are also leaning into our distribution partners, airlines, and online travel agencies (OTAs) to get more customer impressions when they’re at that converting moment.

Q: Earlier this year, you signed Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone as a global brand ambassador. What was the rationale behind this choice?

Mark: We look for people who have built authentic communities and stories to share. During our research, we were looking for people who could authentically tell their stories of traveling outbound from India across the world. Deepika Padukone emerged as a clear choice. Her community overlaps with our target audience, who we believe will benefit from our products.

She is a working professional and will be a working mother soon. People relate to her at multiple levels as they juggle in their lives. She has nearly 80 million followers on Instagram and is a self-made influencer in this marketplace. We were aligned with her authenticity and strength and believe that she will help us take our content far and wide.

Q: In the last few years, marketing has evolved and is at the confluence of data and technology. How is Hilton traversing this journey?

Mark: We started making major investments in Martech stacks during the pandemic to enable new capabilities to engage our customers. It was a great opportunity to build strength for the future.

Today, we have an on-property messaging platform, Kipsu, which allows us to message guests whenever they want to talk to us. We have been able to create a single view of our customers, not just our Honors members but also those who have stayed with us once or twice.

Our Martech infrastructure and capabilities enable us to engage with customers based on their preferences. Their journey begins with watching content on YouTube and learning about our offerings. They visit our website or engage with us via WhatsApp and book the right product accordingly, assisted by the hotel teams for their needs inside the property. The journey ends on social media with customers telling our authentic story. This data helps us personalize our offerings and add-ons to them. For example, if the customer is a family, we showcase content for connected rooms. If the customer is getting married, we showcase where they can go and the type of rooms they can book.

Q. And finally, how does your loyalty program help in creating better brand salience?

Mark: The Hilton Honors program has about 190 million members, and we are the fastest-growing loyalty program on the planet. Every day we’re adding 80,000 new members to Hilton Honors. Our ability to personalize customer experiences plays a key role in growing this program.

It offers a high-value proposition from day one and makes it easy for customers to join. They get better prices, and new experiences including access to concerts and McLaren F1 Racing, room upgrades, and much more. Hilton Honors aims to engage the least frequent traveller to the most valuable traveller on the planet.

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