UNCORKING A BRAND'S POTENTIAL.

HILTON HOTELS.

Strategy / Branding / Design / Video

THE CHALLENGE.

CREATE EFFECTIVE TRAINING MATERIALS FOR A HUGE INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE.

We’ve history with Hilton Hotels that goes back many years on numerous projects…but few have been as complex and daunting as this one. The Food & Beverage team for Europe, Middle East and Africa wanted to use wine to better enhance their guests’ dining experience - and increase spend accordingly. This meant providing core product training for staff in around 250 hotels across 70 countries – almost 7,500 people in all. Apart from the obvious logistical and production challenges, the team faced another problem: how to organise, interpret then communicate the sheer volume of product and service information they had available in a way that’s accessible for multi-national and varied levels of experienced staff.

OUR APPROACH.

GETTING THE ESSENCE TOGETHER.

We immediately recognised that this training needed to incorporate sales, operational and marketing perspectives as well as educational and creative considerations. So, we brought together our own team, Hilton’s own in-house experts - including three master sommeliers and a nationally-recognised wine expert often seen on British TV – plus other trusted partners and suppliers (not least a very hospitable winery owner in Portugal…). This multidisciplinary group, numbering around 40 people, provided a broad range of input, insight, and viewpoints.

Our first task was to break the mass of information down into more manageable chunks. We then looked at how to make it accessible, engaging and relatable for a diverse international audience. For us, video was an obvious and central part of the solution as well as image-led layouts and real-location photography to create relevant, believable content. Our creative also focused on using ‘real’ people from across the business and capturing their knowledge and expertise in video and on the page – something we knew from experience would really resonate with the audience.

THE OUTCOME.

A PEOPLE-FIRST PLAYBOOOK & PROGRAMME.

Following hundreds of hours of work, we produced ‘Uncorking Potential’ – a complete training package comprising a ‘master’ overview guide, plus a series of nine downloadable resources enabling trainees to dig deeper into specific subjects, all supported by over 30 individual videos.

Hearing their peers and colleagues talking about wine in terms of present opportunity and future growth helped make it relevant and personal to the trainees. And making the training flexible, digital and on-demand made it accessible to all, overcoming many of the logistical and practical issues of such a large-scale project.

This will be an organic, evolving programme that will develop in line with the industry and hotel landscape, and we look forward to providing ongoing support for this project.

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