With nearly 600,000 hotel rooms worldwide, the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is committed to being the number one hotel choice for travelers. In this session, attendees will learn how IHG’s marketing team tapped its Communispace private online community as a vehicle to among other things, test advocacy within its Priority Club Rewards (PCR) program and quickly and cost - effectively drive incremental business. With a minimal budget, IHG selected 150 Communispace PCR community members to participate in a friends and family promotion, the Triple Points Promotion. This select audience offered a direct line to the right group of customers for IHG: loyalty members with a vested interest in IHG brands and the services provided by the rewards program.

PCR community members had six weeks to apply their Triple Point Promotion codes for three - night stays in any IHG hotel worldwide. The goal was to share their codes with as many friends and family as possible to win hotel stays and drive awareness for IHG’s services and PCR program.

The campaign’s success far surpassed IHG’s expectations, yielding results such as:
* With little investment from IHG, the promotion drove a quarter of a million dollars in incremental revenue in just six weeks.
* By passing on their promotion codes, participants generated over 1,600 registrations for the promotions ten fold reach, yielding 4,200 room nights and 7.2 million points earned for PCR members.
* The campaign quickly spread to friends/family in 30+ countries.

As a direct result of the advocacy campaign, IHG reached customers whom they might not otherwise have been able to, and did so entirely through word of mouth, without any of the advertising, marketing or support costs associated with traditional promotion strategies. This session will help other companies explore whether a similar approach for enlisting customers as brand advocates is right for them.

Client: InterContinental Hotels Group
Agency: Communispace
Budget: n/a
Date of Campaign: 2008