Amid changing consumer behavior for travel, new variants of COVID-19 like delta and omicron, and ever-evolving health regulations, it’s been a busy two years of navigating new terrain for Marriott International. Now, the hotel company is exploring more newness in virtual reality, following the launch of its first NFT collection.
“We’ve all learned over the last two years how to relate and engage in a more virtual manner,” said Brian Povinelli, senior VP of brand, loyalty and portfolio marketing at Marriott International, on a recent episode of the Marketer’s Brief podcast. How Marriott will operate in the metaverse is still to be determined, he noted, but he can envision marketing uses like a virtual experience for some of its hotel brands.
Marriott introduced its first NFT collection at Art Basel in December, and customers reacted in an “overwhelmingly positive” way, Povinelli said. The hotelier is looking at how the metaverse and virtual goods can be used as a marketing tool to educate customers about its brands.
How Marriott is looking at the metaverse as a marketing tool
Brian Povinelli, SVP of Marriott
The NFTs included loyalty points for Marriott’s Bonvoy program, Povinelli said, noting the “real world value” of the strategy. Now, Marriott International is looking at other ways to integrate virtual trends into its business and how to monetize such initiatives.
Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis.
On the podcast, Povinelli also talks about how Marriott is continuing to navigate the pandemic. The company consolidated its media partners 18 months ago, choosing agencies that could help with flexibility if messaging needed to change quickly.
In mid-2021, Marriott introduced "The Power of Travel," its biggest global campaign to date, to take advantage of surging interest in travel. Marriott has been reliant on social media more than ever as a way of targeting travelers who are booking at the last minute.
Marriott is “leaning more into social, driven by that short booking window where people are making more last-minute decisions,” Povinelli said. “To have that immediacy and be top of mind when making these more impulse decisions, social is a platform that allows us to be in that conversation a little bit more on a daily basis and change the messaging up more quickly than traditional media outlets.”
