Feature: B2B marketing: Finola Fogg and Best Western Hotels

Booking agents and other buyers in the conference and meetings industry are inundated with incentives all the time from hotels and other venues. To gain cut-through, Best Western Hotels launched a creative business-to-business communications campaign that not only boosted sales but also won a Gold award at last month’s ISP Awards.

The campaign was created by Foundation Marketing Communications, based in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. The agency has been working for Best Western for over two years, initially just on its loyalty programme and then, after winning a pitch a year ago, on all of its marketing communications.

Best Western is not your normal hotel chain. It is a network of 280 individual hotels across the UK (with 4,000 hotels in 80 countries worldwide) which are each independently owned and managed while being committed to common standards of quality, service and value. It has been operating in the UK for over 40 years.

The award-winning campaign, under the name of Finola Fogg’s Magical Mystery Tour (more of which later), was focused on First Place, Best Western’s two-hour search service to customers, such as booking agents, government clients and corporates who want to book meeting and conference venues.

Foundation looked for a way to create a new way of speaking to this audience, by communicating an exciting message to grab and retain their interest. They identified the need for an integrated campaign using both online and offline activity, with a frequency of contact that would build momentum around the promotion.

To achieve the challenging goal, the agency created a character called Finola Fogg, a young female character who figured across the marketing communications. The target audience was predominantly corporate travel agent booking centres, which mostly employed women aged 18 to 25, who were already receiving a wide variety of incentives from the major hotel groups nationwide.

To kick off the promotion, sales teams from Best Western visited the call centres and delivered wine to all those involved, using a bottle carrier branded with the Finola Fogg creative. They also sited posters around the offices explaining what the activity was about.

The campaign then launched officially with a direct mail sent to a database of over 50,000 people, outlining the promotion’s mechanics and the prizes they could win and reminding them of the core product messages. Calls to action drove enquiries to First Place agents who also promoted the campaign verbally. A dedicated microsite also provided details of the promotion, including the terms and conditions.

For every £3,000 generated in bookings, an entry was added into a prize draw. Four draws were run during the campaign, each stage requiring an extra £3,000 to qualify, up to a total of £12,000 in bookings. Prizes included health and beauty vouchers worth £250, shopping vouchers worth £500, travel, dinner and accommodation for four people, and holiday vouchers worth £3,000.

By the end of the campaign, business revenue was increased by over 10 per cent, with £1.8 million directly attributable to the activity – more than a hundred times greater than the total budget. “Finola became a talking point among the agents to the extent that they are already asking when she’ll be appearing again in 2008,” says Foundation account director Neil Onions.

Foundation director Sandi Haythornthwaite adds: “We felt that a lot of hotel groups approached agents in a very corporate fashion without realising that a lot of them are human beings in their 20s and 30s. We tried to get inside their minds and capture their imagination. Rather than just sending out hotel brand messages to them, we wanted to capture their eye and appeal to them as individuals and reward them for their work.”

Foundation’s latest work for Best Western is its Real People campaign, which targets consumers with brand messages that highlight the unique individuals who work at the different hotels.

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