Graduate Hotels Nostalgia Capstone

CHALLENGE

A hallmark of the Graduate Hotels brand is instilling collegiate nostalgia across university campuses in the United States and Great Britain. As part of this mission, Graduate Hotels’ social media content and hotel programming are focused on evoking nostalgic experiences for guests and current university students alike.

To better connect with their target audience, Graduate Hotels needed to create a stronger nostalgic content strategy and programming operation that would create higher engagement levels among Gen Xers and current university students.

MY APPROACH

As a communications intern with Graduate Hotels, I had the opportunity to create a capstone around the concept of nostalgia and how to implement it into Graduate Hotel's social channels and offer in-hotel experiences. After conducting consumer research reports and psychological analyses, I created a campaign connecting Graduate Hotels to nostalgic, pop-culture moments that would connect with their audience.

One of the most central parts of my nostalgia capstone was re-inventing the pre-existing nostalgic content on Graduate Hotels' social channels. Previously, Graduate had been posting imagery reminiscent of the 1960s, which did not connect with their target audience of Gen Xers, who are the primary hotel room bookers. After researching psychological trends for Generation X and nostalgic themes, I envisioned a content strategy centered around pop-culture moments and college life from the 1980s that would connect with this audience. This strategy included using imagery from U.S. college campuses in the 80s and regularly featuring student life across the brand's social channels like Instagram and Facebook.

Another component of my nostalgia capstone was to connect with current university students where Graduate Hotels are present on campus. Part of the Graduate mission is to embed their Hotels as part of the university campus and student lifestyle. To do so, Graduate often features events in their hotels geared towards the enjoyment and interests of college students. To fit into this mission and apply nostalgic elements, I envisioned hotel programming that would tie into the pop-culture movements of the Y2K era. To do so, I imagined events that would include student movie nights at the hotel with classic early 2000s chic-flick movies, as well as Y2K karaoke nights. I also envisioned featuring classic 2000s era childhood snacks at the Poindexter, Graduate's in-hotel café.

The last part of my nostalgia capstone included implementing scent marketing initiatives into each of Graduates' hotels. When researching nostalgic components for my capstone, smell was repeatedly the number one sense that evoked nostalgic responses. Smell also serves as a highly effective marketing tactic by helping to facilitate customer recall. Using this research, I envisioned a partnership between Graduate and a scent marketing brand that would help create a signature Graduate scent for all hotels in the portfolio. This scent would include nostalgic scent notes reminiscent of college experiences while also assisting consumers in associating the smell with the Graduate brand. To extend this scent marketing initiative further, I imagined creating a Graduate scented candle to sell in hotels and online to help diversify Graduate Hotels' current merchandise.