A five-star hotel in Hong Kong, no less. And a hotel that prides itself on being “a responsible multi-national hospitality company that values and celebrates cultural differences and understanding”.
Now think of the worst possible marketing strategy for that hotel. Go on, try to think of something that totally undermines its positioning and heaps scorn upon you. I can almost guarantee that whatever you’ve just thought of is nowhere near as bad as the strategy recently adopted by Langham Hotel.
Now think of the worst possible marketing strategy for that hotel. Go on, try to think of something that totally undermines its positioning and heaps scorn upon you. I can almost guarantee that whatever you’ve just thought of is nowhere near as bad as the strategy recently adopted by Langham Hotel.
For anyone who missed this little nugget, Langham released a series of videos (some still available on YouTube) under the theme ‘Big deal’. Designed to show how Langham made a potentially daunting trip to Asia manageable, it portrayed a series of Western tourists finding life on the mean streets of Hong Kong unbearable - the traffic, the noise, the endless harassment from watch sellers. One woman tries to order chicken at a street stall and is handed a bowl of congee with a chicken’s foot protruding from it. She makes it back to the Langham where she can enjoy such local delicacies as, um, a spring roll in peace and quiet. If the colonial-era prejudices weren’t bad enough, the videos featured acting that would disgrace a school play.
It wasn’t long before this campaign caught the attention of Hong Kong bloggers, who tore it apart mercilessly for completely misrepresenting one of Asia’s safest cities. The press picked it up. Even the Hong Kong Tourism Board condemned it. The videos were pulled.
In Langham’s defence, it claimed the campaign was satirical and ‘misunderstood’, and that it was forced to pull the videos before the final ‘reveal’. In literature, the best satires may well be so good you don’t realise they’re satires. In advertising, the danger is that by the time you get to the ‘reveal’, you’ve lost more goodwill than you were hoping to gain anyway.
There’s been plenty written about how the Langham campaign demonstrates the perils of social media. It doesn’t, beyond proving that bad advertising of any sort will be torn to shreds. This is not Hong Kong’s version of the Skittles website fiasco in the US. Skittles opened itself up to the online community and got burned. Langham just put a few videos out. There is not much of a ‘social’ strategy in that.
What it does, however, is highlight a real danger about online marketing. A lot of brands are keen to experiment with social media, but ‘guerrilla’ and ‘grassroots’ should not be equated with ‘cheap’. The quality of the Langham videos was so low that, even if the concept was tongue-in-cheek, there was no way of telling. Just because the internet is filled with low-quality content doesn’t mean brands have to add to it. In fact, for any brand with aspirations to quality, maintaining standards has never been more important.
Got a view?
Email david.tiltman@media.asia