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NATIONAL REPORT-Strategically marketing ads and finding the money to pay for them can be a vexing challenge for hotels and motels trying to get their voices heard in the deafening din of commercial TV and radio.
But increasingly, franchisees are discovering it's smarter and more cost effective to pool their resources-both with other members of their chain, as well as the competition-in joint advertising campaigns designed around a single theme or message.
"The easiest and most practical way to develop effective co-op advertising is to work with a convention-and-visitors bureau or a group like AAA," said Peter Frantz, director of marketing for the 140-property Best Value Inns chain. In recent years, the chain has developed both generic corporate advertising mostly created and approved by the home office in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as well as regional campaigns pulling together the resources and talking points of any number of franchisees in a given regional area.
"Increasingly you are working at parallel levels, trying to promote the overall image of Best Value Inns in national advertising while also working on regional themes that some of our members can sign on with," Frantz said.
Those themes, according to Dennis Gemberling, the president of the Perry Group in San Francisco, a hospitality-management consulting firm, center around specific events that define geographic location.
"In the New Orleans regional market,...