AKA Hotel Residences

AKA Launches New York?s First Hotel Outdoor Bedroom

Situational Analysis
We had already accomplished the business goal of placing feature stories on AKA as a growing extended-stay brand in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Now we were charged with securing consumer, lifestyle awareness for the emerging luxury brand.

Marketing Objectives

  • Make AKA pop as lifestyle and innovative brand.
  • Break through the clutter of thousands of expensive penthouses vying for the same attention to communicate the impressive penthouses of AKA.
  • Increase traffic to AKA?s website.
  • Achieve client?s goal of getting AKA into Travel + Leisure.
  • Accomplish the above on a very limited budget.

Target Audiences

  • Primary: US Luxury consumers/travelers.
  • Secondary: Luxury international travelers.

Research, Planning and Implementation

  • While we felt there was ?something? in the large terrace spaces of the penthouses, we knew they were not enough around which to build a winning campaign.
  • We asked ourselves: What would turn the penthouse terraces into a WOW? What would make them unique and different?
  • We decided to focus on AKA?s flagship, Central Park-property penthouse. With its 1,000-SF wraparound terrace and fireplace, it?s the most interesting one. If our creative worked here we would roll it out to other AKA properties for additional exposure.
  • We developed New York?s first hotel outdoor bedroom. We put a bed out on the terrace in front of the fireplace. We added a five-star camping experience and the opportunity to sleep under the stars with an E-reader loaded with fireside stories, Maison du Chocolate s?mores, cocktails, a flashlight and a state-of-the-art telescope. Price per night: $3,000.
  • We timed the launch with the onset of warm weather after a record-breaking winter.

Message
AKA is a cool and innovative lifestyle brand. It doesn?t get much cooler than sleeping under the stars in Manhattan.

Results
We achieved all objectives:

AKA popped as a cool brand with consumer coverage, including photos, of NYC?s first outdoor guestroom in USA Today, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Bing.com, Boston Globe, Indianapolis Star, The Record (NJ), Tucson Citizen, Urban Daddy, Hotel Chatter, Sherman?s Travel, AOL Real Estate, Curbed.com, ABC News Now and MSN.com. The bed was an MSN.com top-5 story of the day. Upcoming: NBC New York Live, Departures NYC iPhone app.

The impressive penthouses of AKA were communicated to the target audiences via over 634-million media impressions.

The bed doubled AKA?s website traffic.

We achieved the client?s goal of getting into Travel + Leisure, which wrote: ?Camping goes ultra-luxe in New York City.?

We also reached the secondary international audience with coverage in newspapers and magazines in Ireland, UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Australia with titles that include Irish Times, The UK Guardian, The Sun, Sunday Times, Aer Lingus? in-flight magazine Cara, Spiegel. Germany, Italy?s Virgin Radio and TV, Elle Sweden, Vogue Australia and more.

While producing revenue was not a goal, we created an exclusive deal with UrbanDaddy Perks that generated $6,000 in revenue.

The outdoor bed was so successful that we are rolling it out to additional AKA properties in NYC and elsewhere.

Budget
We accomplish the above on a very limited budget of $250 for the added package components. This makes the ROI 24:1.

Source: http://www.quinnandco.com/2012/07/aka-hotel-residences/

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