Q1: Why is Rosewood considering a new brand strategy?

Under three decades, Rosewood had successfully achieved a global reputation leveraging their
ability to boost and augment a property’s value by creating a unique and a small scale ultra
luxury style experience which was also its main differentiating aspect w.r.t. other
hotels/properties.
While this was working out for Rosewood in certain dimensions, they were not able to establish
a connection between their properties and their parent brand name i.e. Rosewood Hotels and
Resorts properties.
The primary reason that Rosewood was considering a new brand strategy was because the
individual branding strategy was not responding well with their objective any more.
We can further list out the below reasons in support of their decision:
 Poor brand awareness as properties were mostly disconnected from the parent brand
name( individually branded hotels and properties)
 Increasing competition in luxury hotel segment as well as it was difficult to contest
against hotels that maintained a consistent brand name among their offerings e.g. 4
Seasons, Ritz.
 Creating separate brands for individual hotel properties failed to retain and/or create new
customers who wanted to be able to access the Rosewood properties experience in
multiple (Competing with other hotel properties, the Rosewood has only 5% of cross-
selling rates, which is not only one of the lowest in the industry of individual branded
hotels (5%-10%) but also compare with corporate branded hotels. (10%-15%).)
 As calculated by them the CLV using the existing branding strategy was lower than if
they used a corporate branding strategy.

The only way to stay in competition was to grow. The current strategy impedes Rosewood only
to a subset of the luxury market with saying that “those sophisticated customers who value the
distinctive, exclusive ‘collection’ hotel”. Research suggested that the vast majority customers
within the luxury hotel market valued the corporate-branded hotel. The prospect of growing their
average number of visits per guest per year from 1.2 to 1.3 through the use of a corporate
branding strategy was appealing enough to seriously consider changing.

Hence, a new branding strategy proposing an increased customer profitability and lifetime value
is needed.