If you like me are hooked on the Undercover Boss series on Channel 4 then you will be familiar with the Best Western episode, which aired a few weeks back (sorry I’m blogging about this now but I actually only saw it last night on the On Demand service. It’s strange how we all see different shows at different times theses days!)

For those of you that are unfamiliar with this documentary series, basically each week a CEO goes back to the floor in his/her own company undercover posing as someone trying to get back into work.

Best Western has been the most interesting episode to date as the company have recently spent over £1 million on a television advertising campaign with their new strapline ‘hotels with personality’ in a bid re-inject life into, what consumers see, as a rapidly dated brand.


Here’s what CEO David Clarke found during his two weeks undercover:

-   In many cases their message of hotels with personality wasn’t the case in reality – many hotels were dated, shabby and badly run.
-   In one case a hotel had failed to achieve a satisfactory quality level to be affiliated with Best Western and had been going to great length to deceive the company and pass hotel inspections by swapping room numbers around!
-   Because Best Western does not own it’s hotels (each hotel is independently run by its owners and affiliated with the Best Western name), almost all customer facing staff knew nothing about Best Western, its affiliation with the hotel or its brand values.
-   Despite spending £1million on a television advertising campaign David Clarke found that neither the staff or customers were aware of the campaign at all

So what can we learn from this and what can you do to make sure you don’t make the same kinds of mistakes when marketing your business? I think it can be boiled down to two major factors:


TV Advertising Doesn’t Work!
Quite a bold statement but trust me it’s true. Unlike in the past, companies can no longer use television advertising as the easy route to get word out about their product or service. Not only has the way we consume television completely changed and diversified making it much harder to reach everyone in one place, but companies can no longer simply command the attention of consumers by advertising on television. The way we as consumers interact with brands has completely changed (for the better I might add) so just launching a TV advertising campaign (regardless of how much you spend) is a complete waste of time. I encourage anyone interested my comments on this to read the work of Seth Godin who pioneered this idea in his book ‘Purple Cow’.

In the case of Best Western, it appeared that they had invested this £1 million in TV advertising because they saw it as a complete solution to the problems of how consumers perceive their brand. Unfortunately for them – no one saw it (as was made clear by customers and staff during the show!)

If you run a business of a smaller scale than Best Western then this is actually good news. They could have carried out a much more creative and effective for their £1 million. In fact they could have achieved better results with a lot less! You can do the same and not being in a position to afford television advertising is no longer a minus, it’s actually a plus – you just need to be creative and use a wider, better mix of marketing tools.

Marketing Messages Should Align With Reality
Treat consumers with respect, which means speak the truth in your marketing messages. If what you are saying in your marketing doesn’t match up with actual customer experiences then you’re not going to fool anyone. In essence I can actually see the reasoning behind the ‘Hotels With Personality’ strapline – many other big hotel brands standardise all their premises to be exactly the same. This means they name have no discerning features or personality of their own and Best Western are not like this – each hotel is unique.

The problem is that, although each hotel is indeed unique, the show proved that this was not always a good thing! Hotels were not of a consistent standard by any means and many appeared to be in a state of disrepair.

In essence their new strapline was actually good from an advertising perspective. The problem being that that’s all it was – a marketing message. It doesn’t really have any grounding in reality. This is an example of a company investing in marketing in isolation in an attempt to counteract ailing sales. They should have coincided this marketing activity with a wholesale rework of how they ensure hotels are all maintained to a consistent standard. The best example of this not being the case and therefore Best Western completely reversing any interest (if there was any) generated from their marketing campaign was when at the end of the show David Clarke goes back to the hotel that he saw witnessed deceiving Best Western to pass their inspections. From a marketing and PR perspective and to show the viewing public that the company had learned anything from this swap, he could only do one thing – inform the hotel owner that Best Western would no longer be affiliated with this hotel.

Instead, he had a meeting in front of the cameras with the hotel owner. After a very staged looking and false conversation where the owner unconvincingly promises to try harder to improve and raise standards, Mr Clarke decides to shake hands and leave it at that. I don’t think it can be under-estimated how much this will damage the Best Western brand. After all the talk of change and modernisation and spending £1 million pounds on an advertising campaign, in less than 2 minutes this wall all shattered and shown to be nothing more than all talk no action. A big mistake in my mind!

And the lesson for you: make sure marketing messages are grounded in reality.