Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is letting consumers weigh in on what goes into developing its future hotels by letting them enter a virtual hotel environment online.
The hotel will launch the tool next week as part of Second Life, an online 3-D portal used by more than 360,000 people. For the initiative, consumers log on to SecondLife.com to download an application and then select a virtual representation of themselves to tour different parts of a hotel.
“We’ll test how consumers interact with the space” in the hotel, said March Schiller, CEO, Electric Artists, New York City, the company that handles the initiative for Starwood. “We’ll evaluate how [consumers] use the lobby or navigate a living room” for example.
Consumers’ feedback will help the hotel chain in its development plans for several hotels slated for 2008 and hopefully encourage users to stay at Starwood’s properties.
“The richness of the experience depends on the people using it,” Ewen said. “This is a revolutionary business model. This is how [Starwood] can get feedback about what consumers need before building it.”
White Plains, NY-based Starwood will promote the concept on its Web site.
Schiller was part of a panel that discussed case studies and trends in viral and guerrilla marketing.
Panelist Sol Masch, senior manager of marketing for MTV Networks mobile division, offered a case study of the promotion the entertainment company launched with automaker Hyundai earlier this year to reach the youth audience. Consumers sent a text message to the network for a chance to see pop artist Pink in concert. A viral component urged friends to also send text messages, with the city generating the most text messages hosting the concert. All entrants received a text message alerting them of the winning city (New York) and participants in that market received a text message inviting them to the concert, which took place in April.
“They [Hyundai] wanted a one of a kind event and wanted to associate with music,” Masch said. The promotion was touted on MTV’s Network of channels.
In discussing offline guerilla marketing tactics, Sam Ewen, CEO Interference, Inc., New York, noted the difficulties in conducting guerilla promotions in certain cities.
“Steven Spielberg could make a movie that blocks off 10 blocks of Madison Avenue for eight hours a day for free,” Ewen said. “But if we take a brand and say we want a corner in New York City and we’re giving [the city] $100,000 to do it, it’s a problem.”
Other large metropolitan cities like Los Angeles and Chicago are difficult to launch street promos and “it’s becoming even more challenging,” Ewen said.
“We have to find ways to have [guerilla] promotions that are organic in these landscapes,” he said.
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