Morgans Hotel Group: Be the Symbol of Recession Defiance
Last fall, late at night, the Morgans Hotel Group projected a film on the walls of buildings outside nightclubs in London, Los Angeles, and Manhattan. The film featured pumping club music and stylish people dancing, and a headline intended to redefine the economic downturn shone above them: "Recess Is On." The film proclaimed "F%$# the Recession" as revelers gave viewers the finger. (See the film at the campaign's site, www.recessison.com.)
"We like to offer our customers a different point of view," says Scott Williams, chief marketing officer at Morgans, formerly known as Ian Schrager Hotels. "We like to take a dare and be provocative. We want to talk to customers in an authentic way, to look 'em in the eye and tell them we have a soul as a brand." The campaign targeted the haunts where Morgans' clients can typically be found. Anyone home by 10 p.m. wasn't somebody Williams wanted to reach.
In Williams' view, the campaign said to consumers, "Come ride it out with us and you'll have a better time than with anyone else." While you can't control the recession, you can control your attitude about it. In other words, you can choose to be happy — happy enough to keep paying top dollar for a hotel room at the Mondrian in Los Angeles or the Royalton in New York.
“F%$# the Recession” T-shirts are still the top-selling items in the hotels’ minibars. The company can’t keep them in stock. The blogosphere lit up with amused and generally positive reviews — so much so that Williams decided to continue the campaign through the summer and make it the foundation of all client outreach going forward.
Williams started with the premise that Morgans’ clients aren’t really after hotel rooms. Instead, the “cultural creatives” who are Morgans’ loyal clientele are looking for an entrée to a hip, urban party scene — one Morgans delivers through its clubs and restaurants in each hotel.
Dan Ariely, an economist at MIT who studies consumer behavior, says Morgans’ campaign would have been even more effective had it gone further with its anti-recession message. “Just denying it is not sufficient,” Ariely says. “It’s not helping people fight the fear. I would have liked a deeper approach.”
Fear is a strong driver for consumers, according to Ariely, and today’s consumer is wracked with it. He believes companies must address it directly. “What makes us afraid is not necessarily linked to reality,” he says. “It’s the thing we think we have no control over.” In his view, the most effective marketing helps people think through emotions to arrive at rational purchasing decisions.
Ariely points to two firms in the financial sector that he thinks have done a good job of this. Discount brokerage Charles Schwab & Co. has been featuring founder Charles Schwab and his daughter talking directly to consumers in advertisements. The elder Schwab discussed the many economic downturns he has seen over his lifetime and offered guidance. And Bank of America now offers a series of tools on its Web site, including a detailed, user-friendly mortgage calculator developed with algorithms from MIT. The idea is to give people better data to help them more clearly understand their financial situation, Ariely says. The goal Ariely identifies, however, is not all that different from the goal of Morgans’ “F%$# the Recession” campaign: to convince people that “fear is for small minds.”
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