Last weekend (July 5-7), Singaporeans gathering at popular youth hangout Orchard Cineleisure had the chance to experience Singapore’s first mobile pop-up hotel, created by Asiarooms.
In the weeks prior, the mobile pop-up hotel had appeared in Raffles Place and Raffles City as part of Asiarooms’ campaign to “raise awareness of how important hotel rooms are in making a trip enjoyable and memorable. With that, we hope that our customers will be able to experience choosing the right room for their dream vacation”, said Clarence Lin, brand development lead of the hotel portal, owned by TUI Travel.
The fully functional hotel room featured a glass wall façade, a comfortable double bed, a lounge area and modern fittings like air-conditioning and LCD TV. During the day, the hotel was open to the public and they stood win prizes ranging from hotel stays to iPods to spa, food and beverage vouchers. The campaign had 25 hotel partners.
At night, it was made private for staying guests – including local celebrity bloggers Dawn Yang and Darren Ng who gave live updates on their Twitter and Instagram accounts.
“There was no sales element. I wasn’t there to sell food or mobiles. I was there to say, a positive hotel experience can do wonders for your dream vacation,” said Lin, pictured left front row with his marketing team inside the pop-up hotel.
Its website meanwhile featured pop-up specials offering rates of up to 67% off during the promotion period – allowing the company to track visits to the website triggered by the offline campaign.
And this is how Lin believes in building a brand – using a 360 degree integrated approach, creating brand experiences and engaging with people who matter to the brand in a contextual manner.
He splits his marketing budget (which runs into millions of dollars, that’s all he would say) equally between offline and online.
To him, offline drives online. “If you switch off digital and SEM, your brand disappears but if you introduce innovative marketing activity, you are able to have your brand stick.”
When he does offline, he doesn’t do “senseless” advertising. “I don’t place ads, I don’t do taxis, buses or print ads, I create experiences and engage with people in a contextual manner.”
Another example – in February this year, to coincide with Chinese New Year as well as Valentine’s Day, he created the “Love Train” campaign in Singapore, painting the interiors of six trains with Asiarooms colours, getting two couples to propose onboard the trains and then sponsoring their honeymoons.
“We found that couples travel a lot during Chinese New Year and so we took six carriages and talked about what loves means and reconnected Singaporeans with their love of travel,” he said.
Commuters on the Love Train were able to read the top tweets from AsiaRooms’s Twitter followers, and shared their love stories on a Facebook app, which allowed Facebook fans to pin badges of their “first” romantic moments on the Singapore map.
The campaign received “ridiculous coverage” in local media and the blogosphere, said Lin. “We were not hard selling rooms, we were building an experience and engaging with people contextually.”
At the same time, it ran a sales element on its website with specially curated hotels for romance and “we were able to see an uptake in traffic to the site and sales numbers”.
When Lin, a former Singapore Tourism Board marketing executive, first took up the reins of building the Asiarooms brand 18 months ago, his objective was to be visible especially in the online space on sites where it mattered. “Now it’s about building a brand that offers an experience, which is why we do experiential out-of-home branding.”
In Hong Kong, it’s entered into a branded content partnership with television station TVB. The content will also be exported into Malaysia where Asiarooms already has the number one share of voice, sponsoring numerous programmes in the country.
And in case you think Lin has bucks to burn, he is quick to assert, “We are a cost-conscious company, being a dot-com business, we make sure every campaign works. We measure what we do by brand awareness, site traffic and sales numbers.”
Asked to disclose sales numbers, he said, “We are showing double digit growth.”
All the creatives are done inhouse, he added. “I guess STB taught me one thing – if you find something that works, you hit it hard.”
Offline drives online - how Asiarooms creates brand experiences
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