In 2022, JW Marriott began a partnership with landscape designer Lily Kwong to hone the concept of the JW Garden — green spaces at JW Marriott Hotels where guests can relax, take time apart, and rediscover the world around them.
By creating gardens with Lily, the brand built new experiences and drove awareness around holistic well-being, one of its core pillars and an important avenue for generating interest and excitement for luxury travel consumers.
In 2023, this partnership extended from North America to Asia, with a new JW Garden created with Lily debuting at JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach.
JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach offered a new and unique setting for a tentpole JW Garden, and a new narrative for the campaign — a secluded, tropical oasis built into a modern hotel amid an expansive metropolis, featuring flower-covered trellises and a signature ingredient of pandan for use in the hotel’s bar and spa programs.
To fully present the story of the new garden in Singapore, the campaign comprised two pieces — a look back to the roots of the partnership and the first three gardens created across the US, and a new video series offering a deep dive into the JW Garden in Singapore, along with new social-first still imagery.
To share the JW Garden in Singapore, the brand created a five-video story series with Lily acting as a narrator and guide, presented through evocative, documentary style footage shot at Lily’s home in Los Angeles as well as the new JW Garden. These videos covered five topics to give a full view of the JW Garden — a new overview of the partnership, its inspiration, garden design, guest experience, and culinary perspective — with placements across Instagram, IG Stories, Facebook, Twitter, and Threads.
Overall, the goals of the campaign were:
For a campaign focused on one specific brand initiative at one hotel, the JW Garden Singapore campaign has exceeded expectations. It outperformed other similar campaigns across the Marriott International luxury portfolio, and achieved our goal of refreshing and growing awareness of this brand pillar.
The campaign produced a strong number of thruplays, indicating a high level of engagement and interest with JW Garden content — up to 25% higher than similar campaigns after being normalized for spend. This clearly demonstrates the power of using narrative video to capture audience attention and support this ongoing brand initiative.
These thruplays allowed the video series to achieve an average View-Through Rate (VTR) of 5.51%, surpassing the VTR metric of similar Marriott Luxury campaigns focused on F&B and service by up to 60%.
As JW Marriott continues to emphasize and expand its position in the well-being segment of the luxury travel space, marketing that brings awareness of well-being as a JW Marriott brand pillar and its associated offerings carries high value.
Following in the steps of the other JW Garden campaigns that have come before, this campaign generated significant success. By creating raw brand exposure and reinforcing of a major brand pillar with our core audience, it shows the power and promise of supporting brand priorities through engaging storytelling.
