The pandemic proved the most challenging year in Marriott’s 93-year history, as it ended 2020 with an annual loss of $267 million—the second largest after its 2009 annual loss of $346 million. While hotels shuttered and countries closed their borders, travel wanderlust grew stronger as consumers longed to get away both locally and abroad. Due to pent-up demand for travel, Marriott is hopeful that rising vaccines will boost a rebound. We spoke with Brian Povinelli, senior vice president, brand, loyalty, and portfolio marketing, Marriott International, to learn more about the company’s new global “Power of Travel” campaign, how consumer behavior changes are affecting its media placements, how current occupancy figures are shaping up and more.

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If there’s been one key pandemic learning so far for Marriott’s portfolio of brands, what would you say it is?

There’s been cultural learning [about] just how critical travel is to our personal well-being, to a greater sense of community and toward encouraging more openness and acceptance on a global scale. We didn’t realize that and took it for granted in normal times. But after being stuck in your own home for a year, I think people realize the power of what we deliver as a hospitality company that enables some of that cultural well-being and healing.

From a marketing lens, we asked whether we need to be much more nimble in our marketing strategies, in the way we approach putting our message in the market. During the pandemic, we had to pivot [messaging] almost weekly… and have an ear to the ground on customer sentiment. Sometimes the message was dictated by government regulations and opening and closing markets. Most brands would define that strategy as nimble.

We’ve pivoted to create a nimble strategy that will continue even past recovery of the pandemic, especially because customer sentiment is changing on a much more frequent basis today than it did even a couple of years ago.

Are there any other consumer behaviors that Marriott has observed over this past year that you will incorporate into your strategy moving forward?

Staycation for sure. One, I think going a little further afield would be the explosion of the road trip. It was partly driven by the fact that airlines were out and we saw a huge movement to road trips and people flocking to more remote, outdoor destinations like the national parks. 

Then this whole concept of “work from anywhere,” a new phenomenon that we’ve seen that continues strongly today—people realizing that if they didn’t have to go into the office and could do everything through a Zoom-type platform, that they could relocate for a while. And especially with the younger generation who are less tied down with families and other commitments. A huge amount of people were using our hotels and homes and buildings as a place to work remotely for weeks or months on end.

How has marketing budget allocation changed based on these behaviors?

Yes, I would say we have. With the whole underpinning of being nimble, we are still utilizing occasion-based viewing on linear TV. So take something like the NBA Finals or the Olympics, we will utilize those platforms, but we’ve also shifted significant amounts of our investment into the streaming platforms. Not only because that’s where viewers have shifted, but also because there’s a lot more real-time data that we can get back from those platforms. We’re testing some shoppable ad units where people can literally click on the ad unit on the streaming platform, view more information and book a trip from that. So I think you’ll see us leaning more into connected TV OTT and the broader digital platforms, as well as experimentation in the social platforms.

We did our first foray into Tiktok and we’ve done a unique partnership with Pinterest. The amount of travel and wanderlust that’s gone on with consumers over the last 18 months has been taken to a new level because they were deprived of that opportunity to get out and see different parts of the country or the world, with the effect that they’ve been much more engaged with travel content on social platforms.

So we’ve been leaning into that and trying to put out inspiration to then lead to user-generated content and help amplify our message. It’s been quite successful over the last couple of months. And in this campaign launch specifically, we’ve seen that user engagement because people are so hungry for inspirational travel stories and images.

Marriott Bonvoy’s recent Power of Travel campaign includes many firsts for Marriott. Walk us through the brand’s thinking behind the partnerships with influencers and the shoppable Hulu ads.

We’ve tried to find influencers who grounded their storytelling on the idea of wanderlust. Some have a large following and some have more niche followings, but they’ve all got a very engaged audience in this one topic. This isn’t the first time we have worked with influencers, we’ve been doing that for years. But I would say it is definitely the first time that we’ve used Tiktok as a platform. We thought it would be more grassroots and authentic than us creating content and just pushing it out as more of an advertisement on that platform.

The shoppable ads are definitely a first. The goal came from the insight that we are seeing our booking window over the last 18 months shrink significantly. We’re seeing a lot of travelers literally booking and staying within 24 hours, almost like it’s become much more of an impulse purchase. And I think it relates to vaccine roll-outs and people hitting that point where they’ve had their two weeks of post-vaccine quarantine and then say to themselves, “That’s it, I’m going to leave tomorrow and go somewhere.” That short booking window has led us to look at some of our media placements a little bit more as an impulse buy.

So think about the grocery store. You go down the checkout aisle and there are all of the candy bars and the gum and the magazines that you just grab even though you didn’t plan to buy that when you went in. We thought we could have a similar dynamic here where if people were watching a show on a streaming platform and then they were introduced to our marketing, engaged with that ad, and go book that trip, whether it’s for the next day or the next week or the next month. And where before, people might spend three or four weeks and look at 20 or more websites in order to make the decision of where to go and stay, now we’re seemingly seeing people willing to do it on a whim and with a lot less research than they had prior.

Marriott’s recent social listening research saw a year-over-year uptick in searches for one-of-a-kind stays. What role has social listening played in Marriott’s strategy in the past year and is there one tool in particular that has proved especially useful?

A few years ago we implemented a new capability within Marriott called “M Live.” It’s a group that focuses on social listening through the worlds of data and creative. They put out polls, scrape social sites, and collect data from other third parties that we then turn into segments, use for specific targeting and to identify emerging trends. 

That is where we’ve focused over the last 12 months as things have changed so dramatically week in and week out. We’ve leveraged those analytics and that social listening group within our organization to help guide what markets we should be going after. For example, we saw in the US, markets like Arizona and Florida open much more quickly than those in the Northeast or other parts of the country. So we were able to validate that there was that interest through these tools and the data, and then we were able to craft messaging specific to those markets or those trip types.

How is Marriott responding to the finding that people are looking to experience more one-of-a-kind stays?

We’re looking at that in two ways. One is working with properties to create those unique experiences. Luckily, we were doing that pre-pandemic. So it was ramping up the availability of those types of experiences and doing a little bit more of that. You will likely find that in a luxury or upscale hotel and with brands like Westin or the Ritz-Carlton. And even our select-service hotels that are in more rural destinations and those by national parks have put together more experiential-type packages. We even formed a partnership with the national parks where customers could use their Marriott Bonvoy points to buy annual park passes. So that was one way. 

Then the other is a real continued focus on growing our collection of brands. We have about 450 independent hotel offerings that a lot of people weren’t aware of. Those tend to be your smaller, more boutique, more experiential-type properties; again, a destination that connects you much more closely to the local destination and cultural experience. We opened 70 new properties in those collections this year. So continuing to fuel that pipeline and look for conversion opportunities and new growth opportunities in that segment.

What are some of the updates Marriott has made to quell travelers’ concerns around cleanliness and face-to-face contact?

We sprinted very quickly to elevate some of the contactless opportunities. Mobile Key is one that we really accelerated and are now at over 4,000 properties, and that allows you to check-in via your phone, skipping the front desk entirely. 

We’re also piloting a check-in kiosk in several of our hotels in New York City. Think about how airlines have had travelers check in at the airport kiosks. It never found its way into the hospitality space, but we felt that in this environment that was another option where people could engage with a kiosk and minimize the contact they might have while checking in or out.

So those are some of the new initiatives that we either accelerated or are piloting during this period. And then the cleaning protocols—we already had very stringent cleaning protocols in place pre-COVID. We just elevated those and made them more public-facing with hand sanitizer in all the public spaces. 

The customer response has been great. Mask mandates are the one thing that has been a bit tricky for many businesses and industries to navigate because they became political, but we just stayed within the CDC guidance and followed their directives.

Beyond cleanliness, how has Marriott’s portfolio of brands responded to other consumer trends spurred by the pandemic? For example, I read that some Westin properties introduced recovery stations in response to people’s heightened focus on self care. 

It gets back to a little bit of the social listening and data that we were looking at during this period. Wellness was one trend that was significant. Wellness was compromised all of a sudden with the pandemic so it became a much bigger focus and people were stepping back and re-evaluating their lifestyles in a lot of ways. So we asked how we can elevate our wellness experience given that we built our whole brand positioning around well-being for the last 10 years. This was a great opportunity to take that foundation and introduce a new initiative all-around recovery. 

So through the partnership with Hypervolt, we put up a new station built around recovery within the fitness centers. That’s one example of a “work anywhere with Marriott Bonvoy” strategy where we’ve created a specific package around that wellness dynamic. We rolled out different levels of packages. For example, we implemented day passes, which you couldn’t get prior. To do that, we re-engineered our booking portal to be able to accommodate that and also to accommodate extended check-in and check-out hours. Then there was a stay pass, which was an overnight stay that came with other amenities, snacks and meeting supplies if you needed them, for that “working from anywhere” environment. The last was the play pass, which was built around this blend of leisure and business where your family is at the pool while you might be working in the room.

According to the company’s Q1 earnings, in Marriott’s largest regions, the US and Canada, occupancy started the year at 33 percent in January and reached 49 percent by March. Do you have any current occupancy figures you can share?

I can see demand definitely varying by market, but we’re encouraged to see a strong rebound. US and Canada occupancy for May was at 55 percent, so definitely seeing continued momentum. I have a couple of other examples here—in Greece, bookings were up 6 percent versus the same two weeks in 2019. So they’re actually outpacing 2019 numbers. And then we’re also seeing special corporate demand, at about 50 percent of 2019 levels, which is a significant uptick from where we were a month ago. So we’re seeing positive momentum on both the leisure side, which is leading the recovery, but also on the corporate or B2B side.

The leisure market is poised for a rebound, but how does Marriott plan to acclimate to the drop in business travel?

We’ll have to see how it continues to play out. I would say we are optimistic that there will be a notable recovery in business. We are, like I said, seeing special corporate demand, and we’re seeing people start to get back to the office, and I think we’ll see a significant boost there. 

So it’s going to be about keeping a pulse on how this hybrid work model plays out. Despite not seeing the same amount of business travel that we’ve seen pre-pandemic, we think there could be a different dynamic happening where because of hybrid work models, people now have several days free where they could take a long weekend away. They could do Friday and Monday working remotely, and then take the weekend for leisure time. We’ll be keeping a real close eye on how consumer behavior evolves as we continue getting higher vaccination levels.

We’ll also have to see how the corporate workplace and these hybrid work models play out. But I think we will see a lot of people taking longer trips. Even over the holidays, there’s this dynamic shaping up where instead of taking a week off, if you have the flexibility to work remotely, you could be taking a month off.

Tell us more about Marriott’s recent partnership with Uber. 

Our partnership with Uber was great because we had been looking for ways to strengthen engagement with the rewards program. A big pivot we’ve made over the last year is positioning Marriott Bonvoy as a travel marketplace that has a loyalty program and offers 30 hotel brands, homes, villas, tours, activities and partnerships like with Uber.

The idea behind partnering with Uber was that traveling through a destination means you need a rideshare service to get to and from the airport or your hotel. They go hand-in-hand. And with what we’ve seen through the pandemic with the proliferation and success of things like Uber Eats, this partnership is just another opportunity to keep people engaged with our platform through earning and redeeming points, and, in some ways, to keep them engaged with us when they’re not in a hotel. So it’s all about bringing added value to the overall program and your interaction with Marriott. 

How is Marriot approaching the first-party data conversation and delivering personalized experiences to customers while protecting their information?

Like every company, we’re navigating all of the data privacy laws and remaining compliant with all of the rules that are out there. The nice thing for us is that with over 150 million members, we have a lot of first-party data. We obviously go through the right protocol to get the marketing message to the people who are engaged and have agreed to receive it.

The more reasons we can give people to engage with Marriott Bonvoy, not just for hotels, but for things like the partnership with Uber or tours and activities, or dining out options, the greater ability we have to grow from 150 to 200 million, 250 million members.

There are various ways that members can interact with us and varying degrees of information they opt to give. Some are more willing to share than others and will tell us directly what their preferences are, what they’re looking for. That helps us personalize the experience even more. Even if it’s just basic information like their name and the type of hotel they want to stay in, we can personalize their experience based on their history with us.

We’re also making efforts with the Marriott Bonvoy app. We launched a new update with a lot of new functionality, not only for contactless engagements but even for a road trip finder where you can see all of the hotels along your route and what they cost. So getting that type of engagement allows us to better personalize the experience and engage with people on that platform as well.

What’s one trend hotel marketers will need to embrace as they return to the next normal?

I’ll go back to build a little bit more on this idea of the importance of flexibility and nimbleness in your marketing strategy. I think that the trend that we’re seeing is that people’s behaviors and sentiments are shifting much more quickly than they have in the past. Social media plays a significant role in that because there’s so much access to information which can lead to quick shifts in sentiment or feelings about a topic or about a brand in particular. So there needs to be a focus on having your ear to that social sentiment through social listening and other data sources, and then having the ability to pivot your message and create many more versions of that message, and also doing a lot more A/B testing of what you put in market to see what’s resonating with people at any given time.

Anheuser-Busch InBev won big at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, taking home 22 total Lions—the most ever in the company’s history. But the road to AB InBev establishing itself as a creative powerhouse was no small task. It started a few years ago when the company rebuilt its internal culture around real consumer needs and the power of creativity. Overseeing that process was Jodi Harris, the company’s first-ever global vice president of marketing culture and capabilities. We talked with Harris to learn more about how she and her team implemented that culture shift, how the company empowered its employees, what it’s learning via social listening tools and a trend CPG marketers should embrace post-pandemic.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What does your role as global vice president of marketing culture and capabilities entail?

In 2017, I was the head of US consumer insights and at the end of that year, my boss Marcel [Marcondes] and I discussed revamping something in the US market where, at the time, creativity wasn’t thriving and our employee engagement was quite low. We were going through several different transitions at that time. You could tell people weren’t feeling valued.

So we created something called Marketing Culture and Capabilities. In order to get to the capability building, you have to start with creativity, so we started implementing programs in the US which had never been done before. We didn’t have a town hall for marketing. We did something instead called the “Spark Session,” which was about building confidence, not just in the whole marketing team, but also the senior leadership team, myself included. Slowly but surely as we started opening ourselves up to things, more and more people wanted in. Because it wasn’t everybody at first, I’d say maybe a third of the population were early adopters. By the end of the two, three years, everybody wanted in. The results went from 62 or 64 in engagement to an 80 in two years. It was nuts.

When you believe in the people around you and you’re going to invest in them and their capabilities, then the world is yours. We started feeling that momentum and then we decided to take it global. 

Pedro [Earp], who is good friends with Marcel, is now my boss. We all believe in this so much that not only is it a global role, there’s now a global marketing culture and capabilities team. Every market has at least one person who’s dedicated to driving capabilities, creativity and this culture shift that we’re going through. We actually realized that we’ve got a lot of internal experts. 

What was it like scaling that culture change globally? 

We have a responsibility to make sure our employees are equipped with the right tools and resources to go further. The first thing we did was partner with the General Assembly to get the resources with our online programming that we can start to embed into our marketing team. It wasn’t just the online content. We actually supplemented it with twice-monthly Zoom sessions, and because we’re able to grant live access to these sessions and also the online program, everybody participated. It was incredible. We had over 1,500 people around the world dialing in to these sessions or re-watching the videos online. 

The other great thing is, we never really understood where we sat versus other companies but through the General Assembly program, they have a benchmark for CPGs. We were falling slightly below the CPG average in the beginning of the year where we assessed ourselves. One full year after the program, we surpassed average and we’re on par with digital natives now. So again, another sense of pride and courage is that the teams took these tools and ran with them so fast. That’s where we started getting a lot more intellect on just how to use data properly and how to set the right KPIs.

It’s not just these vanity measures. We also built our own programming as a part of our old marketing excellence program. Now we have everybody in our marketing academy. It’s been a huge, huge success for us.

Did the company launch any programs during the pandemic to strengthen employee bonds? 

The creativity and agility from working together during the pandemic was game-changing. We created a global cross-functional task force to run our agile program called “Ideas of Good.” It was designed to engage our colleagues all over the world to generate, pitch and execute ideas to address critical community needs during the pandemic.

Many of these needs were common around the world, which made our teams excited to learn from each other and empowered them to quickly adapt for action in their markets. Within the first 90 days of the pandemic we launched 100 new initiatives to help people.

Our Tienda Circa program is a beautiful innovation that was born from Ideas for Good. It supported small business owners with the technology to deliver beer and other goods in an effort to stay open during the pandemic. Never before have we seen the power of ideas from our own colleagues make a real difference in people’s lives.

What is AB InBev’s takeaway from winning the most Lions this year in company history?

This year’s Cannes results for AB InBev really solidified the power of our culture. We have a true culture of ownership, and we saw that come to life over the past year. Our teams never gave up. They delivered their best work because they’re invested in the work and the people it impacts. I’m so proud of what we accomplished together.

The actual journey started seven years ago with our previous CMO who created an internal awards program called Creative X, which we still run today. It’s just gotten so much more powerful and has been a great proxy for all of the other festivals. One example of this is Tienda Circa, which was an incredible win for us at Cannes this year. In fact, it was our first Grand Prix for our internal agency draftLine. It was also the first time that creativity pushed beyond marketing and really brought a commercial aspect to it. It solves a real need that you’re not going to find in a research report.

How has draftLine been impacted by the evolving needs of the company’s marketing teams amid the pandemic?

The pandemic validated our internal creative agency. Starting in 2019, we brought our creative center in-house to stay more connected to consumers and move at the pace of culture. We saw this in action during the pandemic as circumstances changed from one day to the next. draftLine allowed us to stay reactive to, and in some cases anticipate, these shifts in consumer needs and behavior. For example, in the first eight weeks of the pandemic, the US team worked on 500 pieces of creative, and they’ve launched over 30 campaigns so far during COVID-19.

Part of AB InBev’s success is rooted in listening closely to the consumer and leveraging culture as a primary source of consumer data. What tools are you leveraging to this aim?

In the beginning, we didn’t leverage social media in the right way. We had all our social listening tools, but it was really about what were the big trends and fads, and underneath all of that was a bevy of insights of how people are feeling and what they’re liking and not liking and the different dialogue.

One great example of this is the Natural Light brand. One of the team members was running the digital platforms and he started interacting with college kids—of legal drinking age of course—about Natty Light and about college life. One of the things that college students are worried about so much is student debt. Once we started conversing with them and speaking their language, we were discovering new terms. We’d find out what a certain word means. We’d say, okay, that’s the new word to use? Got it. That’s how we were interacting. We’d be one of their friends because we had to become part of their circle. That’s how you realize what’s really important to them. From there, we developed programs around college loans and paybacks. We had students send us their resumés and we’d post the best one on a NASCAR car.

That’s one bigger example, but how we stay on top of that is through really interacting with the consumer firsthand, whereas before it was always in focus groups or waiting for the quarterly brand health report to come out. We still all have that information because it’s important to have, but for us to get much closer to the consumer, we had to interact with them. In the US, we have a big online community with more than 6,000 people that we can interact with whenever we want. 

AB InBev is diversifying its outreach to attract more than just the male gaze. Has the change been effective? What are you learning?

Diversity and inclusion are priorities for the company and for the industry. There are a lot of wrongs that we’re correcting in the marketing industry, the inappropriateness of some advertising from the past. But that stays in people’s minds and it’s a mental asset you’ve got to try to break. We do that with more provocative angles in creativity to get people to think a little bit differently. There are a couple of programs that we’re really proud of, like the work that Budweiser has been doing to promote equality, and of course, the angle that we’re taking is in sports. 

In early 2019, we started a program where we re-corrected some advertising out-of-home from the 1950s to today. That was the first time we realized that people are responding to this, the industry is responding to this, this is interesting. This is actually a valid place where we can have a voice and we should have a voice because of the history. And at the time, Monica [Rustgi] was our first vice president of marketing at Budweiser ever. So it just goes to show you the changes you can make when you understand it.

Then it carried on like a hot fire. People started to understand that there really is a divide out there. We started educating people and started doing that with all areas of inequality. 

We’ve done some work with women in football in the UK. I think the Future Sponsor campaign was awesome. We’re really proud of it. It’s not this one-off campaign, it’s an actual program.

In terms of the brands and championing it, we still have a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way. In our Creative X program, it’s the awards, but it’s also our creative center of excellence. We have huge D&I requirements. For our council meetings, when reviewing the work or helping promote the work. It’s a very diverse group of individuals. We have certain standards where advertising doesn’t go out if it doesn’t meet certain criteria and that’s all fed into our D&I for the company. 

I’m very honored to sit on the D&I counsel for the company. As a woman, as a marketer, as an American, I feel like I have a unique voice in that—from helping to write the D&I statement that we put on as a company and some of the new regulations to working with the team to create new benefits packages. 

During the last 12 months, have you seen a change in the seriousness with which CEOs and CMOs consider corporate social impact?

At AB InBev, we’ve always been defined by our purpose to bring people together for a better world. That mission was certainly heightened during this time of crisis, but more than that, the pandemic showed us the true extent of the impact we make—farmers, bar and restaurant owners and customers, small businesses and more.

Our global program with Stella Artois is a good example of how we supported bars and restaurants with resources and infrastructures to bring people together again, safely. That impact inspired us all—at every level of leadership—to keep innovating and reimagining our business in the communities where we live and work.

Something our CMO, Pedro Earp, has championed is a shift in focus—away from creating ads, and toward building consumer solutions, regardless of the tool. It’s clear that social impact will become ever more ingrained in everything we do.

What’s one trend marketers will face or need to embrace as they return to the “new normal”?

I think one of the big changes that we’re seeing, and it’s a behavior change we’ve been seeing for a while, is the moderation trend, mainly for beverages. It’s awesome. It comes down to health and wellness, especially the younger generations that aren’t taking life for granted. It really is about taking care of our planet, ourselves, our communities. 

The value equation has shifted. We’re seeing it with our no-alcohol portfolio, with our low alcohol portfolio. You see it in the US with the hard seltzer market. There’s a shift that’s been coming for a while, but it definitely has been exacerbated by the pandemic.