Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, a small luxury private hotel management firm running a collection of 12 individually branded hotels and resorts in multiple countries, was wondering how to foster customer retention and loyalty and capture the maximum value from its 115,000 guests. Rosewood had always allowed each hotel to stand as its own individual brand, with the Rosewood name presented as a muted sub-brand, if at all. Now Rosewood's new leadership was contemplating whether the firm should significantly increase the prominence of the corporate identity, making Rosewood a corporate brand. The main challenge that Rosewood's executives face is to assess whether the potential economic benefits from increased guest retention can outweigh the $1,000,000 marketing investment needed to implement the corporate branding strategy. The central focus is a quantitative assignment that asks students to calculate how customer lifetime value would be affected by a shift from individual branding to corporate branding.
In September 2016, Marriott completed its $13.3 billion acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which added 11 brands to its already robust 19 hotel brand portfolio. Tina Edmundson, Marriott's global brand officer, was charged with making sense of the brand portfolio and designing a strategy that would clearly differentiate each brand from the others and a brand architecture system to communicate to consumers how to navigate among them. She would need to decide whether and how to prune brands from the portfolio, whether and how to combine brands through dual-branding and or sub-branding strategies, and whether, where, and how to use the Marriott parent brand to endorse the remaining brands.
Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, a small luxury private hotel management firm running a collection of 12 individually branded hotels and resorts in multiple countries, was wondering how to foster customer retention and loyalty and capture the maximum value from its 115,000 guests. Rosewood had always allowed each hotel to stand as its own individual brand, with the Rosewood name presented as a muted sub-brand, if at all. Now Rosewood's new leadership was contemplating whether the firm should significantly increase the prominence of the corporate identity, making Rosewood a corporate brand. The main challenge that Rosewood's executives face is to assess whether the potential economic benefits from increased guest retention can outweigh the $1,000,000 marketing investment needed to implement the corporate branding strategy. The central focus is a quantitative assignment that asks students to calculate how customer lifetime value would be affected by a shift from individual branding to corporate branding.
Westin Hotels and Resorts adopted a new "lifestyle" brand strategy which provided guests with a new service experience. The dilemma Westin faced was how to operationally build a brand that delivered consistent service on intangible values.
In 2002, Environmental Power Corp. (EPC), a small company developing renewable energy projects, was attempting to commercialize its "digester," a facility that extracted methane from manure, reduced manure's environmental impact, and generated electricity. The company addressed two promising convergent markets: the farm waste management market and the renewable energy market. One of the main challenges was to put together a financial scheme that satisfied the conflicting interests of four groups of stakeholders: the farmers who lacked cash, the investors who distrusted the electricity trading business after the Enron scandal, the utilities who resisted long-term commitments to buy electricity, and the government who was reconsidering its agricultural and energy policies. The primary challenge is to provide a process that reduces animal waste pollution and at the same time provides a positive renewable energy source.