In late 2021, the Marriott hotel chain found themselves in need of a marketing spark. Said spark was found in a Web3 collection of NFTs. Nicolette Harper, vice-president of world advertising and marketing and media at Marriott International commented that “during the pandemic, we had to basically start from scratch. We had to identify where our current and potential future customers are spending their time. What were they doing? How were they connecting? How did they want to socialise? Furthermore, how does a brand like Marriott fit into all that? Through all that data in the research, we really found that the metaverse is a place where our audience were spending their time, whether it was playing games, watching games, going to concerts. This whole social component that they were missing out on during the pandemic, they were getting their fix, if you will, in a very different way, through metaverse experiences. And so we knew we had to be there.”
Unveiled at Art Basel in Miami Beach, the drop included three tokens, every of which was designed by a separate artist. The paintings for the NFTs were impressed by its “Power of Travel” marketing campaign, which had lately launched. The NFTs had been awarded to 3 people and got here with 20,000 Marriott Bonvoy factors, which Harper says “is pretty substantial.”
In July, the model started experimenting with augmented actuality (AR). The AR expertise was launched for Moxy Hotels – a Marriott-owned model that markets itself as “stylish and playful” and is geared in the direction of youthful vacationers within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market specifically and aims to “break the rules in an unconventional hotel stay”. What the expertise permits is for users to create digital avatars. It was additionally launched together with serious regional gaming competitors; “it really was the beauty of combining in-real-life experiences, AR avatars, the social component – which you need in order to really be classified as metaverse – as well as eSports, which I don’t think a lot of hotels have gotten into.”
Marriott is really delving deep into the world of AR, VR and their roles within the metaverse. “I actually had some business meetings in the metaverse at that hotel … It was so unbelievably cool just how realistic everything was. We could rearrange the setups of the conference rooms and create totally different experiences. It was probably one of the coolest things that I’ve done metaverse-wise this summer.”
One informative side about Marriott’s web3 ventures over the previous a number of months has been the model’s strategies for utilising novel applied sciences to complement and help its present and fixed core enterprise mannequin. “While we believe that web3 is definitely the place we want to be, and we certainly think that’ll bring a lot of new and exciting virtual opportunities, it’s really about using that space to enhance our current offerings, and really amplifying versus replacing in-real-life travel,” Harper says. “You can’t fly in real life and defy gravity, but you can do that in the metaverse. So you can have this additional experiential layer to enhance the things that really make us the best in the industry. We want to inspire you in new ways and connect with you in new ways, but ultimately, we’d love for you to stop on by and stay with us in real life.”
