The challenge for any hotel brand today is to stand out and be remembered in the crowded and competitive travel category. In social, it’s even harder. The competition isn’t just comparable hotel brands, it’s everything and anything that cycles through your feed: meme accounts, travel influencers and bold new upstart brands all vying for user’s attention.
So, when we sat down to figure out how to make Hampton stand out in social, we knew we had to do something big and bold to earn attention in the feed. We need to constantly give people reasons to think and talk about Hampton to make the brand top-of-mind so that they’ll book Hampton when the time comes for their next trip.
Objective 1: Drive consideration of Hampton by Hilton.
Objective 2: Increase our share of voice in social.
Many brands play in the social media space on April Fools’ Day, but few actually succeed. To grab attention, we knew we had to be bold but also make it believable - we just needed to find the right opportunity. And with a recent spate of signature soaps, shampoos and conditioners being marketed by our competitors, we had just that.
So, we decided to take the essence of our beloved edible equity, Hampton waffles, and put them where nobody asked them to go – in your shampoo and conditioner. #HamptonHairCare.
We created a combination of :40s and :06s videos that ran across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter featuring our newest innovation: waffle-infused shampoo & syrup blended conditioner.
Objective 1: Drive brand consideration.
Hampton’s April Fools’ Day stunt drove engagement in a 24-hour period.
The April Fools’ campaign drove 4.6M impressions and nearly 1.8M Video Views. Videos drove a 21% stronger VVR (video view rate) than the Hampton average.
Hampton saw spike in bookings on 4/1 (relative to other brands and Hampton year-over-year booking trends)
Objective 2: Increase our share of voice in social.
Hampton’s April Fools’ Day stunt drove high engagement rates.
The engagement rate for Facebook/Instagram was 38% (our benchmark was 13%.)
The combined total engagements was 1.5M.
