Answering the Demands of 24/7 Business: How to Get Your Mobile Strategy Off the Ground

By Stephen Gates

Vice President and Creative Director, Global Brand Design

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

In this session during last year’s 14th Annual MARKETING WORLD 2013: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, Stephen Gates of Starwood Hotels & Resorts shared his company’s secrets in developing their mobile road map and launching award-winning multi-platform mobile apps and mobile web sites. Gates discussed the lessons that apply for mobile engagement across all industries, B2B or B2C.

Take-Away:

It’s important to understand the difference between a long-term vision and individual projects in creating a successful mobile project roadmap for mobile apps and mobile websites, Gates said.

Best Practice(s):

Take the time to understand how to succeed, both with your company and with your consumers, and to internally make a case for why new mobile channels are important. Some still believe social media still holds up to old media, so this has to be an ongoing conversation.

Action Item(s) to Implement:

Starwood, which runs nine design-led lifestyle resort brands, knew they had to go mobile with their online presence, individualizing each resort’s site within a long-term mobile vision for Starwood as a whole. So they started small, by not building a mobile site, but instead using a third-party company called UsableNet. But through that Starwood realized that mobile interactions are completely different on a desktop computer, which got them the results they needed to build a case for their own internal mobile site, as well as the consumer insights they needed to succeed in this venture.

Starwood created an SPG interface for an iPhone app that people could use with one hand, given that, when traveling, people always have something in their other hand, trying to do a private task in public setting, e.g., booking a hotel, getting a hotel number. This concept created customer value for their app.

On the individual projects side, without that little moniker W, people couldn’t distinguish the W Hotel chain from Starwood’s eight others, so uniquely branded apps for each resort became necessary to have.

Take-Away:

Gates shared some techniques for how to successfully get buy-in on your mobile roadmap at your company.

Best Practice(s):

It’s important to recognize you Digital Experience Pothole, Gates said. Starwood had a huge miss on this one. Although their laptop/PC websites were really good, they came up high in a Google search, and the booking facility on their site was very effective, once a customer arrived at the hotel, digital became irrelevant. That was Starwood’s Digital Experience Pothole: The company spent all of their time, money and content getting the customer to the hotel, but not getting them to come back, because digital was no longer useful in the hotel itself. Mobile was the one thing that would allow Starwood to keep their customers digital-oriented, because they would have the digital resources right at their fingertips; it is considerably easier to pick up a mobile phone to do a digital search than to go onto a heavier, more cumbersome laptop to do so.

Action Item(s) to Implement:

Fulfill the promise to give the customer directions to the hotel and proactively give them all of the information they need when they need it, before, during our after their hotel stay. “That’s a platform idea we could stick with for a long time,” said Gates.

Setting up such a constant digital experience for the hotel customer brings value to your brand by creating consumer engagement and brand preference and allowing smarter delivery of information. This will make a company stand out from platforms people tend to automatically check when they get up in the morning (e.g., Facebook and Instagram). By creating this brand value, you give the customer an incentive to come back to you, something they will need and want all the time.

Take-Away:

Gates also shared some of the design and development insights he and his team learned from creating complex iOS and Android apps for smartphones and tablets, including the creation of state-aware user experience design concepts.

Best Practice(s):

UsableNet got Starwood where it needed to go regarding mobile adaptation but gave it zero competitive advantage over similar companies, because it had the same layout/color scheme as everyone else did. So Starwood designed their new mobile website set to be very visual but incredibly functional: full of photos and videos, but usable with one thumb while walking through the airport.

China is Starwood’s second largest market, so they imported their new app to Chinese. However, more changes than just the language had to be made, given the Chinese culture of arriving with no destination lodgings booked in advance. Therefore, the Chinese mobile experience had to have stronger emphasis on searching for lodgings near where the user is and the geographic search process as a whole, so those elements went into the Chinese app.

Starwood’s success at creating nine different mobile sites for their nine different resorts and translating them into Chinese (language and customer culture) led them to relaunch their apps in eight different languages.

Project Shoebox was Starwood’s formation of Passbook, their first stab at the digital wallet. The result was a digital version of Starwood’s starred guest card in Preferred, Gold and Platinum. “We created the digital cards so before you checked in it was easier to reference what the hotel was; before you get there your card will show your confirmation number,” said Gates. Starwood created a total of 1,200 brands of unique digital cards in United States. “We were the brand so widely responsible for getting the iOS design, as the first card to be shredded. We were on stage for the iPhone 5 launch,” he said.

Action Item(s) to Implement:

Make everything very thumb-friendly and readable. Optimize your customer’s mobile experience in a way that adjusts it to new cultures and form factors.

Re-launching your mobile app in foreign languages is one way you can use the mobile web as a bellwether for adapting your next app.

The malleability of the mobile web lets a company change its visual platform in any way at any time, enabling the company to keep up with market changes faster.

Final Thought:

How do you create a strategy for “what’s next,” given what is next?  "Agile" is the new "smart," Gates said, the way you need to structure your business by thinking, “Where are we going to be in two years?” as well as realizing that whatever we come up with, two years from now it is going to be wrong, passé, antiquated, overtaken by a competitor’s innovation.

Therefore, Starwood has moved to a more agile model with their business, so that, whenever things change, Starwood can capitalize on that change, not trail behind as the “Us Too” brand. An agile model will enable Starwood to change with the times, roll with the punches, innovate with the customer.