Accor Company Marketing Strategy

ACCOR MARKETING STRATEGY 5

CASE QUESTIONS 3 AND 4

Accor is a market leader in the hospitality industry, with operations spread across 100 countries and a workforce of over 150,000. The company prides itself in a strong brand portfolio that incorporates brands across four banners: luxury, economy, premium, and milieu de game. This text analyzes Accor’s marketing strategy in the economy and Resorts segments. It specifically identifies the pull and push strategies that the company uses to promote its Ibis (economy) brand and Banyan Tree (Resort brand), and identifies how the company could benefit from implementing a Dashboard for its Resort brand.

The Push and Pull Strategies using the AIDA Framework

The AIDA model identifies the four stages – attention, interest, Desire, and Action – that a customer goes through before making a purchase (Kotler, ET AL., 2019).

Attention: The Attention stage involves attracting the attention of customers and making buyers aware of the product or service (Kotler et al., 2019). At the attention stage, Accor uses a combination of traditional and social media marketing techniques that are mainly pull strategies. Television commercials are the most commonly used traditional marketing techniques in both segments. Moreover, the company offers brand sponsorships for the group in general, such as the partnership with Paris Saint-Germain Football Club in 2020, which help to make the group and its brands known to potential customers. Accor also maintains a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube (Damnjanovic, Loncaric & Dlacic, 2020). The company’s Ibis and Banyan Tree pages on Facebook are both indicative of an active social media promotion campaign that focuses on advertising at least one hotel daily.

The company, however, implements differentiated marketing based on the brand and target customers. Ibis advertisements emphasize the price advantages that customers stand to enjoy, while those on Banyan Tree focus more on the quality of offerings, such as the type of architecture and interior décor, health and wellness facilities, Destination Dining, and private pools. Ibis thus focuses on attracting price-sensitive customers, while the Resort brand focuses on attracting the attention of quality-sensitive customers.

Interest: The second stage is to draw the interest of the customers (Kotler et al., 2019). Accor’s strategy at the interest stage primarily involves pull techniques, including the use of captivating and compelling images and videos to draw customers’ attention to the respective brands and demonstrate why they should choose Accor. Links to videos available on the Banyan Tree and Ibis segments of the website on the respective brands are provided in the references section of this text. To draw the customers’ interests, both brands publish customer reviews alongside the images of hotels, which potential customers can review before deciding to book. Positive customer reviews help to verify that what the company claims is factual.

Desire: This stage entails conveying to the audience the value of the product and helping them see that they need it (Clemente, 2002). It focuses on developing an emotional connection with the potential customer as a means of enhancing their desirability (Clemente, 2002). Both brands arouse their customers’ desires through a loyalty program (pull strategy) that allows customers to earn reward points with each return visit, and to subsequently, use these points to pay for their stay, or access prestigious sporting events. The aim of marketing at this stage is to convince the customer that they stand to benefit from choosing Accor over other companies.

Action: Strategies at this stage are geared at getting the customer to take action, and are mainly push strategies. For both brands, the primary marketing strategy involves sending out personalized emails to all customers upon the completion of their stay or those who attempt to make a booking, notifying them of existing offers such as price discounts.

How can Accor Benefit from a Dashboard for its Resort brand? What elements would you recommend be viewed on the dashboard?

A marketing dashboard combines data from across multiple channels into a single platform. It displays key marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), thus making it easy for the marketing team to clearly monitor marketing efforts and track their performance (Lairson, 2010). A dashboard thus provides a means for identifying the results of marketing efforts and informing decisions on what strategies are most effective and hence, how to allocate the marketing & advertisement budget (Lairson, 2010).