by Shaun Smith
‘The focus of the creative is on Lenny and his enjoyment of sleeping well. The advert sees Lenny in his Premier Inn bed, on a whistlestop tour of the UK. Whether you’re a business traveller needing to get a great night’s sleep before a big meeting, or if you want to catch a good night of “zzz’s” before attending a friend’s wedding, there is a Premier Inn just around the corner.’
Image 12.4 The Hypnos bed
The impact of a campaign like this is even greater when you can put a proof point behind it. When your purpose is very clear this can be communicated in the form of a brand promise or guarantee. In the case of Premier Inn it is the ‘Good Night Guarantee’. If you don’t have a great night’s sleep they will refund your money. Few brands are bold enough or brave enough to stand behind their purpose by making a promise to customers about it. The reason is that they do not have the confidence to deliver the promise consistently. To do so requires careful design to ensure that the promise is delivered consistently across every touchpoint.
The Premier Inn promise became ‘Great Value, Great Rooms, Great People’ backed up by the ‘Good Night Guarantee’. So the ‘stand up’ piece was very clear. Now was the time to decide how to ‘stand out’. This gave a very clear steer to designing the experience.
Design
Having spent the first day of our customer experience workshop defining how Premier Inn should ‘stand up’ we were ready to move on to ‘stand out’. We spent the second day of the workshop with our cross-functional team to take the draft promise and then design the experience to deliver it. We looked at the ‘ECG’ curves and then selected the touchpoints that could become hallmarks for the brand. You can’t afford to differentiate at every touchpoint and it would be less memorable if you did, so a key decision is which touchpoints to over-index or invest in that will have the greatest impact. John Forrest explains this well:
‘We have targeted our investment into the things that really matter to the customer. And internally we have a phrase that is, “We only put cost into the system when the consumer values it and is willing to pay for it”, because, at the end of the day we are a budget hotel business. There is no point in putting gyms in hotels, for example, because our consumers don’t want them. They don’t want to pay for them. What they do want is a great bed; they want a clean, comfortable room; they want a decent-quality shower; and a great breakfast to set them up for the day – and that’s where we focus our investment.’
This operating model is then supported by the business strategy so that there is total alignment between the purpose, the strategy and the customer experience. Simon Jones goes on to explain this:
‘We’ve made choices to support the business model. So, we’ve chosen, wherever possible, to own and operate our hotels because it gives us greater control of the proposition and it has the happy consequence of ultimately delivering, we think, more sustainable returns over the medium to long term. We’ve also made choices around how we distribute our inventory. For example, we could go the very easy and seductive route of opening up lots of third-party channels of distribution, which initially would drive incremental revenue, but actually over time would build cost into our system and mean we would lose direct control of our customer.
‘So we’ve played very carefully with that part of our market. We have one preferred partner, www.booking.com. We closely work in partnership with them and we make sure that how we work with them is complementary to our business rather than competing with our business. We have made active choices, about where we’ve invested in our central teams and where we’ve invested in our site teams, because I’m a big advocate that investing averagely across the business doesn’t give you returns. We have decided we’re going to be famous for service and room comfort. So, we invest in our reception team, and our beds because that’s where we think we can maximize the impact for the guest.
‘And that means we choose not to differentiate in other areas. I think dinner is quite a good example. We provide a good-quality dinner with a decent choice of dishes, but it’s not gourmet food, you know, and the reason we do that is although dinner is important for our guests, it’s not the reason why they stay at the hotel.’
Many organizations we work with really struggle to make this kind of strategic choice. They want to serve ‘all segments’ and be ‘better at everything’. The fact is that a great experience is when you are special to someone special. That means having a clear focus on target customers and what they value. The good news is that this choice becomes easier with a purpose, because it serves to guide you, it becomes your compass. John Forrest makes this very point:
‘Some of the boldest things that we have done have been because we’ve got the purpose as our focal point – do we live up to it? For example, we can’t have guests feeling brilliant about a bed that’s only okay, so we’ve developed our brilliant Hypnos bed that is way ahead of anything on the market. We rolled out 30,000 beds in 2014, because if we’re going to make the guests feel brilliant through a great night’s sleep then we have to spend the money to deliver on that promise. The other bold decision is we’re going 24/7 on social media, and we’re moving to seven days a week on guest relations, because the executive team said “You can’t be a business that’s about making the guests feel brilliant through a great night’s sleep, and then not man your complaints department at the weekend.” So that meant committing to over £100,000 on labour to resource it. But it’s making a difference every weekend.’
One of the most frequent errors we see organizations make is to buy some sexy new technology and then expect it to deliver a great customer experience. It rarely does. The fact is that the technology should enable the experience, not dictate it. Our view on technology is ‘Just because you can, does not mean you should.’ The great thing about having a clear purpose, promise and customer experience is that they point towards the technology and processes required to deliver them. This is particularly true in the sexy world of digital, as Mark Fells knows only too well:
‘Digital channels have a huge role to play by bringing to life some of the key advantages that the brand has. So, we’re trying to find ways to bring to life our rooms, beds and our service to make the brand stickier. Also we are starting to give people more information about the products and services that are available in each particular site by helping them to make an informed choice. So, if the site is particularly good for a sporting venue or if it has just been refurbished or it has our latest new bed that we are rolling out, we are trying to put that across very simply and clearly, very early in the booking process.’
Align
Having defined the promise and designed the experience, the team were now ready to roll this out across the organization and align their 19,000 colleagues with it. But how to do so in a way that was engaging, exciting and experiential? The result was a campaign called ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ and a complete ‘Branded Customer Experience’ training cascade of the same name.
John Forrest was very clear in his own mind that the purpose was the reason for being, and Amanda Brady was busy crafting an employee proposition to create the culture to support it called ‘Premier Inn – a place made by you’, but they realized that there was need for a communication campaign that would intentionally align the organization behind both. They believed that this campaign would probably have a life of a few years but that ultimately it would need to be refreshed – but the purpose and employee propositions would not. They would form the DNA of the brand:
‘We looked at our business plan and our five-year plan together, and it was all about becoming bigger, but to achieve that we needed to be bolder, and we needed to be better. Bigger, in terms of growth, bolder in terms of our approach to things like marketing and digital, and better in terms of the guest experience; better rooms, better beds, better training. Because we’d put our purpose at the top of the business plan, rather than some statistic or financial goal, the purpose is the “why” and the
“Bigger, Bolder, Better” initiative became the “what” and “how”. And, of course, the other ingredient is “Premier Inn – a place made by you”, our employee value proposition that was created in parallel. We had to work hard to make sure they were aligned because it would have been a train crash if they had not joined up.’
Many organizations have brand purposes, promises, brand values, employee value propositions, corporate values and so on but they are usually created independently and in isolation by the owning function and thus fail to ‘join up’. John Forrest and Amanda Brady jointly sponsored the ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ campaign so that the messaging that went out to the organization was seamless. As soon as the purpose was agreed, Amanda Brady set about defining the employee proposition that would ensure that the way people were recruited, trained and rewarded was consistent with the delivery of the purpose. This would ensure that the culture would enable the brand to ‘stand firm’ in the long term:
‘Once we got the purpose, we said, “Right, well, what do we need to do now? What is our vision for our people?” It was very clear that our purpose requires us to hang onto our people because they are the differentiator for our guests. That led to our employee proposition, “Premier Inn – a place made by you”. A key factor in developing it was that we utilized the expertise of the teams to develop something that is theirs and for them.
‘The annual conference was an amazing opportunity to communicate all of this. Initially we let each of the executive teams go off and prepare their speeches, but then when we brought it all together it just didn’t flow. So then we talked about how we were going to make this live for people and simplify it. Patrick came up with this idea of being “Bigger, Bolder, Better”, so we hung all our messaging around that. All the executive team realigned their scripts to keep homing in on the core message. Every time one of us got up, we either related our presentation to one of the three elements or all of them, and we all used movies as the metaphor, so it was great fun. And then we finished by saying, “Well, that’s all great, how are we going to make it happen?” And that was through being really clear about how we were going to cascade it to touch every single team member.
‘The difference with this cascade training is that everybody felt like they had a part to play. We started from the top and it went all the way down to every team member and I think that worked really well. Second, the line managers are delivering it to their teams and I think their commitment to it is evident, so the team members feel that it must be important because it is their line manager telling them rather than an instructor.
‘This was quite a big task operationally but we were very clear that if we didn’t do this, then our competitors might do something better, so to keep ahead of the game we all had to buy into the process. And, actually, as a leader, you have an obligation to make sure that your teams are fully equipped to be able to deliver the promise and also to be made to feel like their contribution really matters. We have just heard that Premier Inn has placed twelfth in the large company category for the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For survey from last year to this year. So I think there have been lots of benefits from doing it this way.’
Image 12.5 The Premier Inn executive team presenting at the ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ event
One of the things that is apparent from these executives is their constancy of purpose and consistency in where the priorities lie. This is partly a result of the process of engagement that Patrick and John led, but also careful attention to alignment. A key part of the ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ campaign was a series of functional workshops that saw each of the executive team lead their teams through the purpose, promise, new experience and how they could support it and their front-line colleagues. Alignment is particularly important when organizations go through structural change or acquisitions. Unless the new people buy into the purpose they can become toxic to the culture. At the time that Premier Inn was launching ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ it was also changing the reporting line of the restaurant business. Patrick quickly realized that the restaurants had to be built into the process:
‘I mentioned our restaurant business, where we had people in 350 hotels who weren’t quite sure where they belonged. They are Premier Inn now. If you cut them they’ll have purple blood. I think this has really helped to pull people together.’
Image 12.6 The ‘Bigger, Bolder, Better’ cascade
The problem with most annual conferences is that they are just that – annual. The message gets forgotten for the rest of the year. John was determined that this would not happen:
‘I decided that my role is to keep our purpose as the single focus and to be relentless in communication. My job is also to celebrate the magic moments, and the heroes, and to shout out when we fail, and fix it. You’ve got to role model the behaviour. It goes back to what I learnt earlier in my career: what you permit, you promote. If you do something then that makes it all right for everybody else to do the same thing. So I try to set the bar very high and reach for that standard and live the purpose; then I can hold other people to it.
‘An important communication tool is my weekly blog. I post good news stories there, so they are available for everybody to read. I’m constantly monitoring what is going on with social media, as well as having a team of people who do it too. I’m encouraging the language and behaviour of our purpose and it’s starting to get infectious; people are spotting stories good and bad, and then just pinging them all over the place. So people say, “This is brilliant”, “What a great example of making the guests feel brilliant”. You’ve just got to keep using the language. So, for example, “This was a magic moment”, or, “You know, I’m not sure this was a magic moment”, or, “How’s the guest feeling? I doubt they’re feeling brilliant?”
‘Going back to why we started this initiative, part of it was codifying our culture and now everybody who joins is going through an on-boarding process that takes him or her back through the journey that we’ve been on, and that is really speeding up people’s integration into the business. Because we are all now able to describe, at interview, or induction, what it is that we do, and why we’re obsessed about certain things. All of a sudden it’s not 15 or 16 different interpretations of what we do; we can articulate it exactly. We’re firmly committed to recruiting for attitude, and not for skill. We can train you to do anything, but if you haven’t got the attitude that allows you to make people feel brilliant, then we don’t want you. Team turnover is at an all-time low and the best in Whitbread. So we’re now capable of keeping our people. We’ve made another bold decision; we’re no longer going to be a minimum wage employer, we’ve taken everybody above minimum wage by introducing our “Team Deal” incentive whereby savings made as a result of improving the customer experience directly benefit our people. We have also introduced variable pay, and pay for progression scheme, which all help to improve the deal for our teams – we’ve made a commitment to hold on to our people.’
If you are determined to hold on to your people you need to make sure they are the right people in the first place. We often tell our clients ‘Hire for DNA, not MBA.’ In other words, hire people first and foremost who fit your culture, not those who are the best qualified. Amanda and her team reviewed the recruitment process accordingly and started an initiative called ‘Brilliant Beginnings’:
‘Our “Brilliant Beginnings” recruitment process has been designed to make sure we recruit people who’ve got the right personality and attitude and who will really care about delivering for our customers. That is very important for us, and I don’t think it matters whether they are 16 or 65. As long as they are behind what we are trying to achieve, and understand it and the role they can play as an individual, it doesn’t matter what educational background they have.
‘“Brilliant Beginnings” is also an on-boarding process. When team members join us we allow them to be themselves at work. We don’t try to tail
or them to the organization. We tell them about our purpose and that what we are about is creating a great customer experience that makes our guests feel brilliant through a great night’s sleep. We tell them that anything they can do to support that will help.
They feel like they are part of a family within their unit and within the brand. I think people are very proud to work for Premier Inn. They know that what we say we’re going to do we will deliver, not just for the customer, but for them too. I think all those things are connected. I hear them saying every day how much we’ve changed their lives and how much this is not just a job to them, but it feels like an extended family.’
Alignment becomes even more complex as you think about extending this across functions, cultures and geographies but, arguably, it then becomes even more important, as John Forrest explains:
‘The next step is to share our purpose with our international business. As they start to grow, we need to provide them with the DNA of Premier Inn and lock them into our purpose to make sure they don’t make decisions that are not aligned. So, yes, you can buy a cheaper bed, but you are not allowed to because we’re about making our guests feel brilliant, and so if you’re going to put a purple sign over the door, then you have to live up to the things we stand for.
‘“Bigger, Bolder, Better” is a campaign that allows us to share the purpose with 19,000 employees across the organization, in the centre, and out in hotels. We needed to get everybody to understand what we’re about, and then give them insight and training, and empowerment to make sure they are able to make that purpose come to life. The conference was just the reveal. Then it took us six months to train people to be ready to deliver the material. That was followed by launch events and people were saying, “Oh, this material is brilliant, it’s great that we are actually talking about what we should be talking about”, and they got really excited about it. I’m also really excited and proud of the fact that our new Marketing Director, Russell Braterman, took one look at our brand purpose video and used it as the basis for our external campaign.’