Peninsula Hotels Treads a Delicate Balance Marketing in Hyper-Critical Mediascape
Photo Caption: An image from a print ad for The Peninsula Hotels' latest marketing campaign, called Peninsula Perspectives. Source: The Peninsula Hotels.
Skift Take
The Peninsula Hotels moved in the right direction to feature its talent as protagonists in its newest marketing campaign. Yet did the brand move too far by not including imagery of the properties themselves?
Success in luxury hotel marketing was a little more black and white before the world became more woke. That's the reality facing The Peninsula Hotels, which last week launched its Peninsula Perspectives campaign. A review of three ads from the campaign — set in Hong Kong, Istanbul, and London — reveals the high bar for success facing all luxury brands in marketing in an evolving media era.
Peninsula received acclaim in the early 2000s for static ad campaigns like “Portraits of Peninsula." Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz was given free rein to capture the day-to-day of doormen, room attendants, and others, in a mesmerizing black and white shots.
Those campaigns included staff, such as the iconic Peninsula pageboys, bedecked in immaculate white uniforms and pillbox hats inspired by military uniforms of the Victorian Era, as they served requests of all kinds from the five-star hotel’s guests.
But social expectations have evolved since then
