Marriott International’s Peggy Roe has been on a long journey with the hotel chain.
Going on 22 years at Marriott, the current executive vice president & chief customer officer has watched the company evolve from a real estate hotel firm to a multi-branded portfolio of experiences that goes beyond just hotels.
“We’ve evolved Marriott Bonvoy as our core brand and more than just a loyalty program or points,” explains Roe. “We aspire for Bonvoy to be your lifelong travel partner. It’s really turning what was technically a hotel, real estate, points loyalty program and elevating it to a brand that is really important in people’s lives. Travel in many ways defines how people want to live and spend time in their life today.”
Marriott International owns more more than 30 leading brands, almost 9,600 properties in 143 countries. The company wants to be the place consumers stay when they are traveling for the things they love. They sponsor sports organizations from the NFL and NCAA to U.S. Soccer and Formula 1. In June, the company launched a media network. Rather than focusing marketing on booking hotel rooms, the company looks at the customer experience. It is about consumer passion points –sports, culinary, music, the outdoors.
“We are really focused on the memories that we create,” says Roe. “That’s what ties it all together. People are often traveling for a reason, which is usually an experience. When our hotels can play a role in that experience, that’s when we unlock the love for the brand.”
Prior to joining Marriott International, Roe worked at General Electric Capital and was an early employee at Amazon. Brand Innovators caught up with Roe from her office in Bethesda, MD to discuss how the company is thinking about the consumer experience, passion points and showing up in culture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you thinking about the consumer experience?
There has been this trend around people spending more on experiences than goods that started pre-COVID. With COVID, when people became more shut off from the world, which exacerbated the desire to then get out again and have shared experiences and to touch and feel and create memories. The experiences are about what you share with other people and the memories you create as a result.
After talking to so many customers who said, we love your loyalty program because of the points or the access, we realized the true story and insight around why somebody comes back to us is because of how we made them feel. People can evoke these memories and experiences about many times in their life or a specific stay or a specific hotel or specific place in a hotel or person that they spoke with.
Can you talk about how passion points are driving how the brand showing up in the culture?
The passion points that we’ve decided to invest in are music, culinary, sports and the outdoors. We’re using these passions to be closer to culture. For example, with the F1 in Las Vegas, we are the sponsors of the Mercedes Petronus team. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli are amazing drivers and they’re doing really well this year. And they have participated in a fun short series with actor Jack Whitehall called The Secret Concierge for our social media.
We are connecting more to the next generation on new platforms like TikTok and Instagram, because of these shorts and because of the way we’re leveraging the talent in those partnerships. That’s one of many examples. It starts with the passion, finding a great partner that aligns with our values and our message and then getting really creative on how we can reach consumers in the environment where they are spending all their time.
What is you approach to leadership?
My approach to leadership is to develop the vision using data and customer insight. That’s my go-to model. First is to paint a picture of the aspiration. I’ve always started with what’s the total addressable market? There’s 1.4 billion travelers and $7.2 trillion of spend across multiple categories, not just lodging. I always start with, here’s the big picture and start narrowing in from there. Build the vision, use data, fuel it with customer insights, let that be core to how I prioritize decisions.
In terms of managing people, get the best talent that you can, build a collaborative culture. In today’s environment, we are focused on having an enterprise mindset, making sure all of our leaders are more enterprise- than discipline-focused. I’ve coined a term internally: move the people to the work. With the speed you have to move at today, the old models of being in departments and having reporting relationships to specific people has to be broken down in order to move quickly and to give people the most range of experiences in terms of growing their skill sets. We tend to create pods today and we move people around based on their skill sets and interests.
Do you want to talk about the idea behind the retail media network business that you launched in June?
MarRIOTT Media, RIOTT Media for short. We are the first hospitality media network. We view it differently from retail media networks in that we are trying to create first and foremost an end-to-end experience for people across their travel journey. When people travel, they are more open to new ideas and spending on new things. We think that it creates a compelling opportunity for brands to be part of the travel experience.
What does it look like from the consumer side?
We’re thinking about it from the customer’s journey end-to-end perspective whether you’re just at the beginning of thinking about where you want to go through to the booking or the experience itself, we want to be relevant. We’ve worked with Pepsi talking about hydration and how you stay hydrated while traveling. With United, we’ve been introducing new destinations, which they fly to. With Visa, we’ve been reinforcing the fact that you can travel across borders with your Visa cards.
Everything comes back to what’s important to the audience in that moment and how we can tell the story. Eventually, we’ll be able more personalized. Today, we can flex the message based on location and based on brand. We’re building the capabilities to really do it more one-on-one. Today we’re based mostly in the US in 2,600 hotels and we will be continuing to expand. It’s a Top 10 network.
You have been with the brand for more than 20 years. How has it evolved in the more than two decades you have been with the company?
When I started, the first project I worked on was rolling out free WiFi and upgrading beds across all of our brands. We’ve come a long way since then. That’s all table stakes now. I’ve also seen the industry evolve in terms of loyalty. Today there’s more than 1,200 lodging brands around the world that we are competing with. We have close to 40 brands ourselves and we’ve had to evolve the thinking around how we go to market from the way we create brands, which today need to be more localized to the way we go to market.
Before we were marketing individual brands, today we are going to market with Marriott Bonvoy, bringing people into the ecosystem and then telling them about the experiences they can get. Those experiences go far beyond just hotels at certain price points. We’ve moved up and down the chain with seven luxury brands. We’ve even moved down to mid-scale. We’ve expanded into homes and villas. We have apartments. We even have residential properties that are branded that you can live in. And we have yachts and then thousands and thousands of experiences.
Can you talk about the new Marriott Outdoors merchandising platform?
If you go to the Marriott Outdoors site, you can now see the seven passions that people have related to the outdoors. You click into any one of those seven passions andlearn more about all the offerings we have against a certain passion. For example, skiing. We have well over a hundred locations that facilitate great ski experiences.
Then we’ve even identified certain moments experiences like meeting Sean White, if you’re a snowboarder. We are leveraging moments and talent and partnerships so we’re able to go-to-market based more on passion. We are able to better understand a person for their passions and preferences. And then that will lead us into this idea of being your lifelong travel partner. If you come in early into our ecosystem, the longer we know you and the more we know about you, your passions and preferences, we can evolve with you over your lifetime.
