Many marketers aspire for marketing to be seen as an engine of growth within the business and for the role of brand to be aligned across the entire organisation.

For modern hotel brand Yotel, aligning brand building with commercial growth has become central to its strategy as the business enters an ambitious phase of global expansion.

The tech-focused hotel group, which currently operates 23 hotels globally, plans to scale to 100 locations by 2031. To support that growth, Yotel has reshaped its leadership structure and elevated the role of brand within the organisation.

At the start of the year, the business promoted Olivia Donnan from vice-president of brand and communications to senior vice-president of brand, culture and growth.

Donnan now leads the company’s global marketing function and oversees brand, communications, people experience and development marketing – a role that also focuses on ensuring the role of brand is the same for guests, employees and investors.

Connecting the dots that we are a global brand, and driving awareness that there’s more than one hotel is the main objective.

Olivia Donnan, Yotel

“It’s a very intentional grouping of our three stakeholders – guests, employees and investors,” she tells Marketing Week. “So putting the brand at the centre of those three stakeholder groups means we can be single-minded in our focus on growth.”

The restructure followed the arrival of new CEO Phil Andreopoulos in September.

“The changes that he’s [Andreopoulos] made in his leadership team – creating this brand, culture, growth department – is a great signal from him of the importance of brand and the importance of brand to the growth of the company,” explains Donnan.

The structure brings together teams that might traditionally sit apart, including brand marketing and people experience. Meanwhile, it means viewing the guest experience itself as a core marketing channel, not something separate.

“The experience on property is as much part of your marketing strategy as the ads you’re running,” Donnan explains. “The job doesn’t stop there. We’ve put [employees] under this brand umbrella on purpose, and I partner really closely with operations to make sure that brand experience is carried right through the whole stay for the guests, so that ultimately they come back.”

From recovery to brand-led growth

Part of Yo! Company, Yotel was founded in 2004 to “redefine” traditional hospitality through technology and efficiency. Initially inspired by luxury airline travel, focusing on smart design and airport locations, early innovations included self-service check-in kiosks, which were once seen as cutting-edge.

The hotel chain now has features such as adjustable smart beds, colour-changing mood lighting and even autonomous robots that navigate to rooms to deliver items at some locations.

The business initially launched in airports, where jet lag and transit made sleep a primary concern, before expanding into city-centre locations. As Yotel now grows globally, including expansion in Asia, the challenge is to build awareness as a global brand rather than a collection of individual hotels.

“Connecting the dots that we are a global brand, and driving awareness that there’s more than one hotel is the main objective,” Donnan says. “Ultimately, [the hotel] is the best place to bring in the customer – redrive the awareness and the consideration.”

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The structure of Yotel’s marketing function has evolved significantly since the pandemic. Like much of the hospitality sector, the brand was hit hard by Covid, with bookings slowing.

When Donnan joined the business in 2022, the immediate priority was recovery and securing “quick wins”, all the more important as it opened several new locations during Covid. Over time, however, the focus has shifted from individual hotel marketing to building Yotel as a cohesive global brand.

“I was looking after the brand storytelling – PR, social, brand partnerships, studio and content in one area, and then driving the individual hotel performance as another area of our marketing,” she explains.

Today, Yotel’s digital and ecommerce team is focused on lower-funnel performance and conversion, with the goal internally described as getting “heads in beds”. Meanwhile, the brand team concentrates on longer-term brand building and emotional storytelling.

“It’s about really getting to know the consumer and then using that to drive the brand’s future,” she explains. “And then thinking about how do we stay relevant? How do we think about what consumers want today? How do we build brand awareness while also thinking about the longer-term strategy of how we are structured?”

‘Know thy guest’

A key part of that evolution has been investing in research to better understand what drives demand for Yotel.

The brand’s research found bookings are largely driven by rational factors: location, price and quality of sleep. While those insights were not unexpected, they have helped sharpen Yotel’s focus as it scales.

“What builds up over time was this idea that our key demographic is people who are really tech-minded and young,” she says. “Ultimately, we needed to actually know who is staying with us if we want to grow the way we do.”

The findings showed that the core demographic is actually largely aged between 35 and 55, placing it “firmly” as a more millennial brand rather than Gen Z. Donnan says that reflects the rational drivers behind booking decisions, particularly the brand’s reputation for good sleep.

“You can do a lot of things to try and make your brand more interesting and more sexy and more attractive, but if you sacrifice sleep, it’s not going to work. That’s your core function,” she explains. “Know thy guest – we make sure everything works for them.”

From a brand perspective, earned media has proven to be one of Yotel’s most effective channels. The brand team focuses on identifying consumer problems and showing how Yotel addresses them, primarily through PR-led storytelling.

That activity is then supported by creative partnerships, social media and paid social to amplify reach.

One example is a PR-led jetlag campaign it ran about how hotels should play a role in rest, recovery and recharge.

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Yotel’s approach to loyalty also reflects its broader brand positioning around efficiency and simplicity. The brand operates a relatively small loyalty programme, with around 150,000 members. It is free to join and focuses on instant rewards rather than long-term points accumulation.

“Our guests don’t want to wait around collecting points,” Donnan says. “We asked our members what actually mattered to them, and price, late checkout and flexibility came up again and again.”

Benefits include member discounts, flexible cancellation policies and immediate rewards rather than deferred incentives.

“We’re not trying to compete with the really big hotel groups. It’s more to try and offer the benefit of booking direct versus going to the online travel agents.”

Looking ahead, Donnan says the long-term strategy is “cleaning up” some of the original thinking around the brand.

“It’s about understanding the guest, knowing what people love about us, and where we have room to improve,” she says. “That applies to everything – from seeing an ad, to landing on our website, to the on-property experience, right through to the final email after a stay.”

The focus is on identifying friction points across the end-to-end journey and improving them through closer collaboration across design, digital, operations and content.

“We’re now putting that into play across the organisation this year, so that we make sure that we are reaching those customers, giving them that right stay.”