This article is from the WeChat public account "Space Secret Exploration" (ID: MESPACE007), author: Li Jing Tao Yike.
On May 7, Marriott Travel Home, a subsidiary of Marriott International Group, announced the signing of a cooperation agreement with the King of Glory Professional League and the King of Glory World Champions Cup, officially becoming a partner of the "KPL King of Glory Pro League", "King of Glory World Champions Cup" and "King of Glory Challenger Cup". Marriott's choice to unite the "glory of the king" that Chinese consumers are keen on this time attracts real players, hotels and e-sports to rent CP, I am afraid that I can no longer only do superficial work.
Once accused of being spiritual opium, games are now regarded as the ninth art. But aside from these clichés, what else can video games bring us in addition to letting people play monsters against the screen? Obviously, more and more groups and brands are already looking for new answers.
Hotels and Esports "Group CP"
It is reported that through this cooperation, Marriott Travel Enjoy will bring exclusive benefits to members through new members registering for the lottery, and "Marriott Bonvoy Moments" (Marriott Bonvoy Moments) that compete on the same stage with professional players. At the same time, some of the brand hotels under Marriott Travel will specially create a series of units such as the king's glory event game space, the event viewing room, the event theme afternoon tea, and the live broadcast of the event by well-known game anchors to respond to the cultural and experience extension of this cooperation.
It can be seen that the main body of this embrace with the glory of the king is not a hotel or brand under the Marriott International Group, but the Marriott membership program Marriott Travel Home. This means that the cooperation between the two sides does not stop at the conventional "hardware level", that is, to create a theme room or theme space, but more importantly, it is played at the "software level".
The extension beyond the "e-sports house" has become the key point worthy of attention in this cooperation.
For example, during the cooperation period, registered Marriott Travel Enjoyer members can receive gifts such as game character skins and virtual props; introduce WiFi rights and interests in the life of the king in many of its brand hotels; some package settings during the Glory of the King World Champions Cup; and access to e-sports culture-related events. These extensions of esports culture have led to higher frequencies of interaction between consumers and hotels.
In the past two years, it is not only Marriott Travel That has chosen to form CP with e-sports, but also Wyndham Hotel Group, which has jointly created the Chuang e-sports hotel brand with Daily E-sports. According to reports, Wyndham and Daily Esports have cooperated with each other to introduce esports elements into their hotels. In other words, Chuang Esports exports the "Esports Hotel Product Model" to Wyndham's hotels.
At the end of April, Regal Hotel Group announced that it would enter the meta-universe by building a green city MetaGreen in the game The Sandbox and developing an ESG-themed plot "LAND". In the virtual estate MetaGreen, Regal Hotel Group has built green hotels and residences.
In 2021, Tencent E-sports has successively released the "New Business Plan" and the "Tencent Interactive Entertainment Digital IP Hotel Co-creation cooperation", and Shangri-La, Hyatt, Wanda, Ascott, Jinmao Group and other wine and tourism groups have become its first batch of alliance partners, aiming to create all-scenario e-sports game theme hotels.
According to the spatial secret exploration, the first five hotels with e-sports theme rooms are Chengdu Shangri-La, Beijing Kerry Hotel, Shanghai Pudong Kerry Hotel, Xi'an Shangri-La and Haikou Shangri-La Phase I. The theme room covers "Tencent E-sports", "Qin Shi Mingyue World" mobile game, "Everyday Love Elimination", "Happy Landlord" and other e-sports and game elements, while providing SKG massager, RAZER Razer full set of e-sports equipment with colorful RGB lighting to enhance the immersive game experience, the price of these theme rooms is basically more than 1,000 yuan.
In addition, BTG Homeinns Hotel Group also reached a strategic cooperation with Shunwang Technology last year, planning to jointly develop THE YUNIC HOTEL e-sports theme hotel.
From international hotel groups to local hotel groups, hotels seem to have found another way to open the "meta-universe", that is, to actively embrace the "trend culture", when the cool train of e-sports slowly comes, some people take the car, some people drive, and some artificial cars.
Old features move backwards, new experiences move forward
Loving to play games is a "bad habit" we've heard since childhood, but today, video games are attracting huge sums of money on an unimaginable scale, affecting the lives of more than 2 billion people. Not to mention that the development of the metaverse is unstoppable, and the "game" is likely to be the entrance to future business.
An important magic weapon for hotels to grasp the opportunities of the meta-universe is to combine these online games that everyone is very "on top". Lisa Hau, co-operating officer of gaming ad technology company Bidstack, previously said: "Online games are much more mainstream than we think, and it's not just teenagers and young men who love to play online games." In fact, it also includes many women and middle-aged players with young mentality.
Previously, Microsoft's news release of the $68.7 billion acquisition of game company Activision Blizzard has caused players to almost jump out of the esports chair, but in the past, it may not have been as important as the weather forecast.
Clearly, esports is no longer just a casual entertainment, but a unique new language that allows people to open their social windows and gain a sense of identity in the same circle. And this group and this culture has grown.
The United Nations Environment Programme has released, "Video games are already one of the largest mediums of our time, reaching 1/3 of the population of the planet, but they have not received enough attention." According to the latest report of Dutch market research firm Newzoo, the global esports market revenue is expected to reach $1.38 billion in 2022, and the Chinese market is expected to occupy one-third.
Marriott International Also mentioned in the press release of the conference that according to iResearch's "2021 China E-sports Industry Research Report", the scale of China's e-sports users has reached 500 million. After the State General Administration of Sport listed e-sports as an official sports competition, e-sports will be officially unveiled as a competition item at the 19th Hangzhou Asian Games.
This is also an important reason for many hotel groups and brands to cooperate with the gaming and e-sports communities across borders. Obviously, the hotel embraces the culture of e-sports, is an expression of embracing the times, and is one of the feasible ways to step into the "meta-universe" unit.
"Hotel + Esports", genre evolutionary theory
The cooperation between Marriott Travel and King's Glory has helped to open a new chapter of "hotel + e-sports". Looking at the market, the "game unit" of the hotel industry has developed into three categories.
The first is the "esports hotel". The appearance of the just emerging e-sports hotel, now looking back or no longer "fashionable", the space is private, equipped with computers, high and low bunks, is the original product model of most of the main e-sports hotels, and many e-sports hotels are "modified" from express hotels. This type of hotel often emphasizes the room function that can "play games", which does attract the favor of many game lovers, and the hotel has achieved revenue growth. At the same time, secondary consumption such as beverages and snacks has also brought certain revenue to e-sports hotels. However, low-end, monolithic, and poor life experience are also routine phenomena.
Of course, after the development of e-sports hotels in recent years, they have become more and more high-end, branded, and all kinds of hardware equipment and life experience have also made great breakthroughs, and are still the mainstream of e-sports types
The second is the "esports theme room". When the e-sports wave hit, many brands did not want to just sit down and watch, but wanted to experiment with it themselves, so creating an e-sports theme room became another way to embrace the e-sports trend. From the brand point of view, the original positioning and equipment has matured, few brands will change their minds to overthrow the inherent culture to do e-sports hotels, unless it is a new brand, so creating several e-sports rooms to adapt to this part of the new demand has become a good policy, but also can express the brand's young and energetic attitude, and the concept of advancing with the times, and obtain consumer recognition.
For example, in 2018, Hilton and gaming computer maker Alienware jointly launched an esports-themed suite known as Room 2425. This room claims to basically meet all the needs of e-sports players, equipped with 7-10 high-end gaming devices, and the price is about 2200 yuan a night.
Since then, hotel brands such as Four Points by Sheraton have also created joint theme suites with aliens to add e-sports color.
The third is the e-sports cultural alliance. It is a blend of culture and culture. Marriott Travel × Glory of kings, Goose Hotel× AG Team, Wyndham Hotel × E-sports, Light Stay Group× Raytheon Digital Entertainment, etc., this type of cooperation has broken through a single game experience, but also created a kind of community integration and recognition. Under the influence of e-sports culture, the target group is more inclusive, they are or the practitioners of fashion culture, not necessarily a gamer, but a de-ageing, emphasizing the same attributes of the cluster.
The cooperation intention of the brand or group is also obviously different, using the way of strong and strong box, high-profile intervention in the trend culture market, strengthen brand positioning, in order to create a new marketing system.
New ways to attract young people
Indeed, e-sports contains great connection value, including circle connection, interpersonal connection, industrial connection, and life scene connection. Especially in the extension of the large entertainment industry, it has a strong magnetic field effect for young people, including middle-aged people with young mentality. Either way, we need to constantly look for new ways to attract young people.
01 Create "Cluster Resonance"
Such as the union of Marriott Travel home and the glory of the king, for the hotel industry, is not too much, when we look at the news and old articles in the field of big fashion, we can see that these are no longer new. The fashion field has long played a different kind of fireworks:
Charlotte Tilbury, who sponsored the Girl Gamer Festival;
On Estée Lauder's microsite Anrcade, users can play some arcade-style mini-games to enhance their understanding of the product;
Clinique, Elf And Nars were among the first brands to try to release NTFs in the beauty space.
……
Nowadays, many brands joint e-sports, tide play, cooperative artists, etc., or the technology products grafted in the above cases or the initiatives to show goodwill to the game, in fact, use a medium to reach a "cluster resonance", and the hotel can also look around for some inspiration for creating a new solution for cluster resonance.
02 Stabilize the base disk and look for new variables
Even in this era of change, brands still need to maintain a certain degree of stability in order to precipitate their own exclusive culture. Therefore, when the trend strikes, it is indispensable for us to actively embrace the mentality of change, but how to enter the market, in what capacity and in what posture, is the key. How to actively seek solutions without destroying brand traditions, clever practices often not only stabilize the basic disk, but also find new variables.
For example, Marriott's embrace of e-sports this time is not to set up e-sports rooms in all its brands, but to focus on MOXY and W Hotels as the main battlefield, and both brands take "tide" as the core concept. The grafting of e-sports houses can strengthen the inherent positioning and also achieve new experiences.
03 Don't be a participant, be an intervenor
Esports is just a medium of trend culture, not the only one. In the future, no matter which medium we embrace, which kind of cultural co-construction we participate in, we may need to first abandon the mentality of focusing on participation, the formalism of shallow taste or understatement is no longer inspiring, we need to get the value we want from the trend of the times, not just the sports competitions on campus General "emphasis on participation" can be ,—— prepared and planned active intervention, is the forerunner should be the posture, and finally form the vanguard force that shakes the industry.
04 Space-time interaction outside the hotel
The goal of cross-border cooperation should not only be to upgrade the experience in the hotel space, but to create another sense of time and space existence in a highly futuristic derivative culture. When a union has become a systems project, not just a guest room business, both planners and executors should understand and accept the value of experimental attempts that promote more than sales, and we are likely to get more value in the spatio-temporal interaction outside the hotel.
No matter which path the brand chooses, the partners we choose should maintain a high degree of consistency, maintain the same level and tone. Ultimately, these initiatives should always focus on the overall loyalty of users, and brands need to connect with consumers, not just provide them with a one-off consumer experience.
When the wave of digitalization hits, no one will miss the opportunity to go ashore in front of them, but it lacks a beautiful landing posture.