Marriott:

The Challenge:

In an everchanging world, Marriott’s ambition is to be pioneers in the hospitality industry. To be proactive, not reactive, taking stock of cultural movements and trends to better cater to the needs of future guests.

Marriott needed to assimilate the major trends and macro-forces impacting experience design and their evolution within the next 3-5 years, to better inform the design strategy across their global portfolio.

The Approach:

For over a decade, we have been helping brands and businesses to be future-ready​.  We track a set of critical forces of longer-term change in various categories that we believe will shape consumer life and business.  This keeps our perspectives fresh and vibrant. ​

Our approach for Marriott consisted of three phases. We started with an initial deep dive into the world’s changing behavioural landscape, clustering these identified forces to determine what was most relevant for Marriott. We crafted several future narratives using these forces, looking at implications on the hotel category and Marriott’s specific design strategy.

The process began with an exploratory immersion into the changing landscape of the world to lay the foundation for trend and macro-force analysis. By clustering the emerging trends into relevant themes, we then formulated 4 provocative and plausible windows into the future, built across a 5-year horizon. In order to drive tangible resonance for Marriott, we then leveraged a collaborative in-person workshop to understand the impact to the hospitality industry, with a specific lens on Marriott’s core business.

The Impact:

We built a set of prioritised future narratives directly applicable to the category and the Marriott portfolio.  For each we defined a Trajectory of Change to frame the story and connected it back to the core need that each tapped into.

We built the strategic implications across each of the 3 tiers of Marriott’s brands including bespoke recommendations for key experience design touchpoints within the hotel ecosystem and workshopped opportunities and implications with the Marriott team.