Northstar

HOTELS www.travelweeklyweb.com Robert Cheng Vice-president, Marketing, The Peninsula Hotels 10 minutes with… Expanding The Peninsula The Peninsula Hotels group continues to expand its presence across 10 properties, with the latest being The Peninsula in Paris. With its flagship in Hong Kong, its properties in Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, New York, Chicago, Beverly Hills, Bangkok and Manila each brings out the essence of the brand and the cities they are in. We speak with the group's vice-president for Marketing, to find out what's in the line-up for the 85-year-old brand. Tell us what's new with The Peninsula hotels since you took on the role as the VP of Marketing. We've really had a big push to restart the marketing and continue to stand out from a communications perspective, so we've developed a new advertising campaign, a series of short films to really communicate what's so special about Peninsula. We've also launched an initiative called the PenCities, which is an exciting initiative where we work with Lux City Guide where they create two pieces of content per week in each of our cities to really talk about what's new, the latest, the hippest event, a trend in each of the cities. We really want to make sure our guests have the best information, about what's happening in each of our cities. Our guests are very well-travelled, so this information is very exclusive, we want to become the arbiter of luxury, style and glamour. We need to create content that inspires and engages our target audience. luckily for us, anecdotally, we've heard very good feedback from consumers, clients, guests and media partners, travel agents, people in general, which has been very positive. It's moved a lot of people and inspired them and that's great. But much more tactically, we've seen a lot more traffic to our website; we've had more conversions on our website so that's more tangible. We also use a lot of video, the internet to distribute that video very heavily. It's not a direct correlation but hopefully that's had an impact. We are also investing more on digital advertising which is more traceable and we've also seen a lot more engagement on social media. What kinds of marketing tools do you use for the brand, to a region like Southeast Asia? We think Southeast Asia has a tremendous potential and we recognise that from a long time ago, having our second hotel in Manila. The way we're marketing is really through events like this. Where we don't have a hotel, we'd like to be here, to spread the message. Our Southeast Asian clients have been really important to us. We're seeing new markets like the Indonesian market, Malaysian and Filipino markets, and Singapore has always been very important. I think we have to be here and spread the message across. For the full interview with Robert Cheng, visit www.travelweeklyweb.com How do you measure how well the brand is doing from a marketing and communication perspective? One of the ways is through Peninsula Moments, it's an advertising campaign. It's hard to say that it's had this much impact but The Indi spensable stry Rea TravelWeekly Asia – a cut above the rest and always close to you Bringing readers vital news, features, interviews and special reports every month, TravelWeekly Asia continues to inform and enlighten, placing you right in the middle of emerging trends and developments. For advertising information, please contact Kevin Ng • (65) 6521 9742 • kevin.ng@contineomedia.com 20 | ■ TRAVELWEEKLY ASIA | SEPTEMBER 2013 Travel Indu d Feature Highlig ht Luxe defi finition finition Vol. 4 Issue 05 | May 2013 | www.trav elwe ekly web. com | Published by Trav el & Mee tings Group, Cont ineo Business $158 m budget illion tourism to boost in New Zealand New Zeala nd's Prime Minis Media S RWM to host US$7 Asian Title 50,0 00 Airlines Page 14 ter John AUCKLA Key anno uncing his ND – A plans for tourism budget the NZ$ sector, of NZ$ 158 millio 158 millio to boos next four n budget n has been years. 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