How Choice Hotels Guide Consumer Trends with CMO Noha Abdalla | Podcast

Thanks for having me.

Great. So my background is in strategy consulting and marketing. I actually started my career in marketing after 9/11. I was in strategy consulting when 9/11 happened, and as a result of the catastrophe that happened in our nation, my project was cancelled, my office was shut down, and I was laid off from my first job. But also as a result of that, the American Red Cross was suffering from a little bit of a PR crisis. People had come out to donate blood, and unfortunately a lot of it wasn't used and was being shown thrown away on the news, and so they had a shortage of blood donation. And that's when I started my career in marketing. I joined the American Red Cross so I could create a national blood donor awareness campaign to raise the nation's awareness about why there's an ongoing need for blood. That's really where my marketing career started and where I really started to understand the importance of customer insight, awareness marketing, PR, and really where my love for marketing began.

Yeah, absolutely. I think to your point, when you're in it, it's really hard to see the bright side on the other side. But 20-plus years into my career, I can now fondly look back at all of those challenging moments and think about how I came out on the other side a little bit stronger. The other anecdote I like to share, which is a little odd, is that I was an A student my entire career as a student: high school, college, MBA. I got my only B+ in my life in marketing. So I don't know what that says, but I think it says that I persevered to prove to that professor that I was gonna figure this out and I was gonna do really well in it.

Yeah, absolutely. So I leveraged my experience in the healthcare marketing space from the American Red Cross to get a job at Discovery on a channel that was called Discovery Health Channel. Since then it's evolved and I think became the Oprah network. But while I was at Discovery, I really started to learn classical marketing. I worked for a leader who had been trained on the CPG side of marketing, and I worked for that leader for seven years both on Discovery Health and then on Animal Planet. It was a really fun, creative environment to be in marketing and to learn marketing, everything from project management to campaign development, media planning, social media started at the time, so figuring that out. And I was lucky enough to be part of a rebrand project where we were tasked with taking Animal Planet from this background channel that people watched or just turned on for their cats or dogs during the day, to something that people would actually want to tune in for. We did a lot of customer insight work, which I really enjoyed. What we found is that people enjoy watching animal programming when they can compare what's happening in animal life to what's happening in human life. So we used that insight to really relaunch the network, the programming, the marketing, the look and feel, to be more about dramatic storytelling versus background programming. That really made a difference in the performance of the network and the advertisers we were able to attract. That was a really cool opportunity and project that helped me understand the value of customer insight, the value of branding, the role that marketing can play in product development and in influencing the product or the programming in this case, and really a transformation of a brand and of the results.

Yeah, and this was 12, 15 years ago, so definitely an insight that I think lasts through time.

Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined Capital One, I joined on the bank side of the house. Obviously the company has numerous lines of business, but at the time they were trying to expand the bank to be a national bank; it was more of a regional bank. During that time that I was there, the company bought ING Direct and integrated ING Direct, which was an online savings bank, and I helped with the rebrand and the relaunch of that into Capital One 360, which was the online checking platform. While I was there, I was tapped on the shoulder to say, 'Hey, you did a great job with this like consultant, come now start this other thing that we want to build, which is social media.' And I said to them, 'I don't really know anything about it.' And they said, 'Oh, don't worry, you're a smart marketer, you'll figure it out.' My other concern with taking it on was the fact that I had come from Animal Planet where there was a small team, one person on my team who managed social media, but we had a lot of content at Animal Planet; content was not a challenge. At Capital One, my question at the time was, 'Why would anyone want to follow their bank on Facebook?' And that was a question we needed to answer because at the time Capital One had a lot of followers through a partnership with a gaming company called Zynga and it was a game called FarmVille. Everyone did it. I was involved with the campaign with Bing where they were the pioneers of that, and a lot of companies had all these followers that weren't necessarily fans; they joined for the wrong reason. It was a race to likes and followers back then, I remember clearly. We bought them and I inherited that page and I had to figure out, 'What do we do? Do we fire followers? Do we start a new page? What is the reason for why someone would want content from Capital One? And where am I going to get the content from?' That was a really exciting challenge in my career, one in which I was able to really chart new territory; nobody had really figured it out. My peers and my boss were like, 'This is open space, figure it out.' The good news was Capital One had a lot of really strong advertising, so the first phase of building out the social media presence was around figuring out how to take some of the strong advertising work that was being done around the NCAA and the Venture Card, etc., and bringing that into social. At the time it was matched luggage; it was very similar. Then we started to say, 'Well, what if we did some more behind-the-scenes and what if we did outtakes and things like that that were different from what was going to be in the ad campaign?' That's how it started to build. I started it on behalf of the credit card side of the business, and then other lines of business came and said, 'We want this too.' So small business bank came, small business credit card, auto loans, home loans, commercial; everybody came and said, 'We want to build this too.' Then we had to figure out how many pages does Capital One actually need in order to deliver on all these different business needs and how should we organize ourselves. That was again another opportunity as a marketer to influence the strategy of the company in the platform. It then grew into content marketing as well as digital product marketing and thinking about how do we take some of the innovations that Capital One had and market those to their customers.

Yeah, I mean I think it ends up being a personal decision. But for me personally, I get up in the morning and get really excited about my job when there's something new to figure out, a new challenge, a new opportunity, something I can build. The moment that the job starts to get a little bit more mundane, like 'This is the seventh season of this one that I'm going to market on Animal Planet' or 'I'm going to build another social media strategy for another line of business,' if it's more rote, then I'm not as excited. For me as a marketer, what I've learned is that by changing industries, I also learned something new about a new channel or two or three that may not have been part of a previous industry or previous company. So as I got a lot of experience in TV marketing when I was at Discovery, when I went to Capital One I got experience with retail marketing in our bank branches, I got experience with direct mail which we didn't do when I was at Animal Planet. I think every time you make a switch like that, if there's an opportunity to learn something new, to tackle a new challenge, it's great. In the case of Hilton, I was approached by a former colleague of mine, a former boss of mine who used to work with me at Capital One, and she said, 'Come over here and build social media for Hilton the way you did it for Capital One.' And I said, 'Thanks, but I've already done that. As a marketer, I don't want to be branded as the social media person; I want to go broader, I want to do other things than just social media.' And she said, 'Come over here, teach us how to do this, set it up globally. That will be the new thing in a new industry, which is a whole different ball game. Then you can pick your head up after a couple of years and pick something else.' So for me again, I was looking for what can I do that's new and different that's going to challenge me. It was the opportunity to do something on a global scale and the opportunity to learn a new industry that frankly I was really passionate about, hospitality, that drove me there, as well as an opportunity to work for somebody who I had a lot of respect for. So that was the decision there.

Yeah, absolutely. So the opportunity to join Choice Hotels was one that I jumped at as soon as I talked to the CEO and the board and understood the transformation that Choice Hotels was looking to make. It got me really excited. First and foremost, the company has been around for 80 years and it's really been focused on franchisees and hospitality and technology. An area that they wanted to really build and grow was the focus on the guest. How can we take a company that's really good at franchising and make us really good at guest strategy, loyalty, and experience? That for me was something that I'm really passionate about. In all my jobs, I've really focused on customer insight and how we can use that to drive the company to a new place. So the opportunity to help with that was really great. The other thing was that Choice Hotels has been known for hotels in the midscale and economy space, but over time had diversified into upscale and extended stay. We were at the time purchasing Radisson Hotels Americas, which was really an opportunity to grow the upscale business on behalf of the company. Figuring out how do you not only integrate a set of really well-known brands, but how do you then come out on the other side and have the company stand for this broader portfolio? Again, another opportunity for me to think differently about how to take the brand to a new level. Those two things alone were really exciting and were what ultimately drove my decision to join Choice.

It is, but it's also a great opportunity. Because as we've learned through a lot of customer research and even just knowing yourself and the occasions that you travel, there's different versions of you. There's the version of you that goes on a guys' trip, there's a version of you that goes on a family vacation, there's a version of you that goes to the family reunion or a work trip, a business trip. For all those different occasions, you're going to need to be in a different place and you're probably going to need a different type of hotel. I think what Choice uniquely offers is 22 brands all over the country and the world, and we undoubtedly have something that's in the right place, the right price point for you depending on what you're looking for and what that trip is.

Yeah, I mean I think what we've learned as an industry is that people took for granted the opportunity that they had pre-COVID to travel, and they really didn't want to lose that opportunity again. So while there may be economic challenges and inflation and things that are making it a little bit tougher, it's one area that consumers aren't really willing to give up. They're thinking creatively about how can I still make the trip but do so in a more economical way. How can I make a smarter decision about how I'm going to get there, where I'm going to stay? The good news is that is a great place for Choice to play because we have hotels at every price point. So if you are looking to still make that trip but just do it in a little bit more of an economical way, we probably have a hotel for you.

Yeah, I think this change in the industry is going to be an opportunity for brands to drive an even deeper direct relationship with our consumers or our guests. We have a loyalty program, Choice Privileges, that has over 63 million members. Our opportunity is to use the data that we have about them in conjunction with other data to get to know who they are, what their passions, interests, likes are, to try to see the signals of when they might be in the market for travel, and leveraging that relationship that we have with them in order to make a suggestion, a recommendation, and an offer that's going to meet their needs. We have been working very closely with a partner, Amazon, to help with customer identity. So when you come to our website or we see you on a digital platform, how do we put together the right pieces of information to identify who you might be and to put in front of you the right offer? That's an area of focus for us. But to your point, I think this direct relationship and loyalty that you can build with your customer base is going to be really critical in the future.

That's right. On our website, we have proprietary technology that we use, for example, that takes thousands of data points to make a decision about how to order the hotels when you do a search, based on what we know about you and a number of other factors, to increase the likelihood that we're going to present you with a hotel that you'd be likely to book.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, it's an area of passion and interest of mine. Not only has it been helpful in my career to work at different companies that are at different stages of this technological evolution and kind of bringing that along in each place that I've been, but also I look for opportunities to connect with peers, former colleagues, and houses to share best practices and insights. I join industry groups, whether it be within hospitality right now or also more globally, marketing leadership groups that allow me to continue to push my thinking and make sure that we're not getting stale in how we're approaching things. Lots of reading online, lots of podcasts and things like that, but also going to these industry events and making sure that I'm leveraging the network that I've built over 20-plus years to ask questions: 'How are you challenged? How are you attacking this challenge? How are you dealing with this?' I do think looking across industries is often really helpful because probably within your industry the companies are doing things pretty similar. It's when you look outside industry that you can say, 'You know what, there might be an opportunity for us to think very differently.'

Yeah, the global MMA board is a great opportunity. I think what it allows us to do is get in a room and talk about what are some of the similar challenges and opportunities that we're facing and how has one company started to solve it, how do we partner together to think differently and potentially come up with a solution that multiple companies could use. Again, it's a really good place to workshop, if you will, AI, how do we handle AI, personalization, all of the buzzwords, but in reality they're all part of what we need to do as marketers today. So that's been super helpful.

Yeah, that's right. Thanks for bringing that up. So we at Choice Hotels have identified these five long-term trends that are really impacting our business and that we think Choice Hotels is well positioned to take advantage of. The first one is around rising wages. We know that the average American's wage has increased by over 6% since 2020. That means there's more money in their pocket to spend. Obviously there's inflation and whatnot that comes with that, but coupled with that, many surveys have shown that Americans want to continue to travel; they're just going to figure out how to do it in a little bit more of an economical way. So rising wages is an opportunity for Choice because it means that people have a little bit more money to spend and we know that they've prioritized travel. The second thing is around remote work. With COVID, it brought this new appreciation and ability for people to work from anywhere. We've seen that in our data. We've seen that people tend to now check in on Sunday or they stay through Friday or Saturday; they don't check out on Thursdays. So there's this blend that happens between the work week and leisure, and Choice again is well positioned to take advantage of that. The third is the reshoring and rebuilding of America. More and more manufacturing is happening in America, and when that happens, there is more investment in construction of factories, roads, etc. A lot of those workers who are involved in those projects stay at Choice Hotels given where some of our hotels are located. So again, that's another trend that we think we're well positioned for. Then you've got road trips. Nothing like COVID to really make people think about how they're going to get from A to B, and a lot of people jumped in their cars. We have over 4,000 hotels that are within one mile of an interstate; that's one of the key benefits of where we're located. With this increased trend in people going on road trips, we've seen an increase in bookings for roadside hotels. Then there's retirement. More and more people are becoming retirement age every year, and those people have money, they have time, they want to stay at hotels. So again, that's a really important trend that we are well positioned for. Those are the five Rs. They continue to ebb and flow a little bit in terms of the metrics and how they show up, but we were early in identifying that these things were happening and we've been continuing to refine our strategy to make sure that we can continue to take advantage of them.

Yeah, absolutely. So we have a campaign launching on January 8th that we're super excited about. It will feature Keegan-Michael Key, who we selected as our spokesperson based on the fact that he's got this really approachable, charismatic nature, he's also got a really great sense of humor, and has often played the role of many different people. The customer insight that we built this campaign off of is that there are a lot of different versions of you and different reasons that you might travel, and Choice Hotels has a hotel brand for you no matter what occasion you have. The campaign is launching at a perfect time, post-holiday hangovers, people are looking for where they're going to plan their next trip. It allows us to be top of mind and potentially that go-to place, ChoiceHotels.com, that people want to check out first as they're planning their next trip.

Yeah, we're really excited about it. I think it gives us an opportunity to showcase the new brands that have joined Choice as part of the Radisson integration. In the campaign, we highlight four of our 22 brands: we highlight Radisson and Cambria, two of our upscale brands, as well as Comfort and Quality, two midscale brands.

Yeah, so I think to the 20-year-old marketer that's starting off, my piece of advice would be to try as many different things as possible. You're not going to know what you like, what you don't like until you try it. So whether it's raising your hand to take on a new project or try a new channel or try a new role, even trying different companies, I do think there's a lot to learn earlier in your career about what you think you might like versus what you actually like. Before I started to really focus on marketing as a career, I had had internships in finance, in international affairs, in law. I tried a whole bunch of things before I landed on marketing. And then in marketing, I also tried a variety of roles and brands to really get to a place where I started to understand this is what gets me excited and what I'm looking for in my next step.

Yeah, I got some advice early on that I've stuck with and given to others, which is: when you're at a crossroads in your career and you're trying to decide should I go left or should I go right, oftentimes there's not a right and wrong answer, it's just a different path. You're going to learn and grow from whichever path you take. So I think once you realize that it's not that big of a deal what decision you make, it can be a little easier to just go ahead and make that decision, and you learn from it and you grow from it.

Yeah, for sure.