Marketing Communication Strategy: Hilton Hotels and Resorts Report

It is planned to explore the success and performance of Hilton Hotels and Resorts, which is one of the world’s leading brands in the hotel industry. The report will analyse marcom strategies used by Hilton, such as loyalty programs, magazine advertising, and social media presence, to evaluate their ability to promote customer loyalty.

Importance of Branding for Organisations/Consumers

Branding efforts have become increasingly important for both organisations and customers in the hotel industry since they facilitate the establishment of realistic expectations concerning the offered services. According to the reviews by Khan, Hakeem, and Naumov (2018) and Barreda et al. (2016), in the hotel industry, branding is associated with consumers’ loyalty and opportunities for quality assurance. As the article by Liu et al. (2017) argues, the assumption that building strong brands should be the basic goal is associated with multiple research gaps when it comes to luxury hotels, which creates the need for new research.

Today’s studies on luxury branding demonstrate that the luxury marketplace is becoming more complex due to the growing demand for high-end services, which changes the competitive landscape and requires businesses to implement new and more effective branding techniques (Giglio et al., 2019). The branding efforts of Hilton Hotels and Resorts, or, more precisely, the brand’s ability to connect with different types of customers, can be studied with reference to customer reviews by the type of client (Chang, Ku and Chen, 2019).

Marcom Tools and Brand Equity

Marcom tools enhance brand equity by disseminating positive information about organisations. Popular brands in the hotel industry use the combination of traditional and online advertising channels (TV ads, social media, websites, luxury magazines, and so on) to improve brand awareness (Krizanova et al., 2019).

Hilton Hotels and Resorts is not an exception to this rule. Despite being considered a luxury brand, Hilton Hotels and Resorts does not overemphasise elitist perspectives when selecting marcom tools and strategies; for instance, as Lin (2018) demonstrates, reciprocal communication with customers via Facebook allows it to spread information and study the preferences of customers of different income levels. Close attention should also be paid to the brand’s use of sales promotion techniques, such as Hilton Honors Loyalty Program (Hantuli, 2016). The proposed report will explore the extent to which traditional and digital marketing techniques contribute to Hilton’s brand equity today.

Justification

The hotel sector has been selected for analysis since it is rather interesting to explore the way of how growing competition shapes organisations’ approaches to marketing communications. Additionally, as is clear from the studies cited above, luxury hotels’ marketing efforts are underresearched at the moment. Regarding the decision to select this particular brand, Hilton Hotels and Resorts, founded more than a hundred years ago, is unique in terms of the ability to maintain popularity and adapt to changes in the marcom environment in a prompt manner. Its closest competitor, Marriott, does not enjoy the same popularity and degree of brand recognition as Hilton, which makes the case of Hilton an interesting research topic.

Reference List

Barreda, A.A., et al. (2016) ‘Online branding: development of hotel branding through interactivity theory,” Tourism Management, 57, pp. 180-192.

Chang, Y.C., Ku, C.H. and Chen, C.H. (2019) ‘Social media analytics: extracting and visualizing Hilton hotel ratings and reviews from TripAdvisor’, International Journal of Information Management, 48, pp. 263-279.

Giglio, S., et al. (2019) ‘Branding luxury hotels: evidence from the analysis of consumers’ “big” visual data on TripAdvisor’, Journal of Business Research, 1-7.

Hantuli, L. (2016) An analysis of hotel loyalty programs: a case study of the Hilton Honors Loyalty Program. Master’s Thesis. The Collins College of Hospitality Management.

Khan, Y.H., Hakeem, S.M.A. and Naumov, N. (2018) ‘The use of branding and market segmentation in hotel marketing: a conceptual review’, Journal of Tourism Intelligence and Smartness, 1(2), pp. 12-23.

Krizanova, A., et al. (2019) ‘The effectiveness of marketing communication and importance of its evaluation in an online environment’, Sustainability, 11(24), p. 7016.

Lin, I. L. (2018) Facebook users’ electronic word-of mouth reactions toward business-to-consumer messages: do message type and media type matter? Master’s Thesis. California State Polytechnic University.

Liu, M. T., et al. (2017) ‘Applying consumer-based brand equity in luxury hotel branding’, Journal of Business Research, 81, pp. 192-202.