REPORT FROM EUROPE—While the first Moxy Hotel, Marriott International’s new millennial-focused brand, is set to open in Milan this summer, in some ways the product is still a work in progress, said Indy Adenaw, VP of brand marketing and sales for Marriott.
“We’ve developed a fantastic design, but we will start picking that apart the very second the first hotel is opened,” he said during a telephone interview. “We understand this isn’t the type of brand in which you design something once and then replicate it over and over again.”
The brand was created in partnership with Nordic Hospitality, a Norwegian hotel development and management company that is a Marriott franchisee in Scandinavia. The company is developing the first six Moxy properties, all in Europe. Adenaw said the first hotel will have 162 rooms and should open in August or early September.
Nordic Hospitality will open the other five hotels in 2015. Like the Milan property, which is at the city’s airport, four of the five hotels—two in Berlin and one each in Munich and Frankfurt, Germany—are at airport or train station locations. The fifth, in Oslo, Norway, is 15 minutes from the city’s airport and downtown.
“The locations fit the brand very well,” Adenaw said. “They’re focused on travel gateways just as the notion of exploring and getting out there fits in line with the Moxy brand.”
He said future locations beyond the original six properties will probably be in urban markets where the hotels can be focal points for guests, but also for people in neighborhoods surrounding the properties where they can serve as a public space and hangout. He also mentioned university markets as logical locations for additional properties.
At least initially, the product will be developed only in Europe.
“The best thing is for the brand to make sure the first six, eight or 10 hotels are very successful in Europe, and from there we will evaluate and determine whether there are other markets—such as North America or Asia—where it would make sense for the brand to expand,” he said. “There is interest in other regions, but we know there first must be a strong model that can be replicated before we start expanding.”
Built for millennials
The company employed focus groups and other market research to determine the design, service and amenity touch points important to the millennial traveler. Public spaces in the hotels are a centerpiece of the concept.
“When we did the positioning work on the brand, we came up with the statement that Moxy will be a new way of traveling in which smaller is concentration, not reduction, and that’s a principle we’ve tried to follow as much as possible,” Adenaw said.
The lobby area is large and adaptable, serving as a breakfast area in the morning and a bar/lounge in the evening.
“The room provides a few moments of feeling like you’re getting a lot more than you’re paying for. It feels spacious, and we believe younger travelers will be attracted to this level of concentration in the public space,” Adenaw said.
As the design of the product emerged, the development group made some changes in the original concept to reflect findings of its research.
“For example, the hotels have what we call plug-and-play meeting rooms that weren’t originally in our design,” Adenaw said. “In our consumer testing we found people don’t like formal meeting space, but rather somewhat informal areas where they can sit down and plug in their content for viewing or presentations.”
Another on-the-fly change was a greater focus on social media in the public space design. The result is what Adenaw calls an “Instagram-type wall” in the lobby in which content from the brand’s social media efforts can be presented.
Strong social media
Moxy marketers will rely on social media rather than traditional advertising to communicate with guests and potential customers.
“From a marketing perspective, we understand the purchasing and travel experience has been driven by this digital wave of the past 10 years, and the marketing of Moxy will be driven by that,” Adenaw said. “We plan to speak to our customers in the way they tend to interact with each other, which is primarily social. We will be supporting the majority of our hotels with this approach as it is very fitting to our target guest.”
The Moxy team recently launched a website with a strong social media component to engage travelers in the brand and its development.
“We want to have them go along the journey with us to see how the hotel is being constructed, what we’re thinking about the experience and how it is coming to life,” Adenaw said. “This is as much about supporting the Milan hotel as it is announcing Moxy to the world.”